Academic Research and Researchers
SRHE and Open University Press Imprint Current titles include: Catherine Bargh et al.: University Leadership Ronald Barnett: Beyond all Reason Ronald Barnett: Higher Education: A Critical Business Ronald Barnett: Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity Ronald Barnett and Kelly Coate: Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler: Academic Tribes and Territories (2nd edn) John Biggs: Teaching for Quality Learning at University (2nd edn) Richard Blackwell and Paul Blackmore (eds): Towards Strategic Staff Development in Higher Education David Boud et al. (eds): Using Experience for Learning David Boud and Nicky Solomon (eds): Work-based Learning Tom Bourner et al. (eds): New Directions in Professional Higher Education Anne Brockbank and Ian McGill: Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill: Discussion as a Way of Teaching Ann Brooks and Alison Mackinnon (eds): Gender and the Restructured University Sally Brown and Angela Glasner (eds): Assessment Matters in Higher Education Burton R. Clark: Sustaining Change in Universities James Cornford and Neil Pollock: Putting the University Online John Cowan: On Becoming an Innovative University Teacher Sara Delamont, Paul Atkinson and Odette Parry: Supervising the Doctorate 2/e Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson: Successful Research Careers Gerard Delanty: Challenging Knowledge Chris Duke: Managing the Learning University Heather Eggins (ed): Globalization and Reform in Higher Education Heather Eggins and Ranald Macdonald (eds): The Scholarship of Academic Development Gillian Evans: Academics and the Real World Merle Jacob and Tomas Hellström (eds): The Future of Knowledge Production in the Academy Peter Knight: Being a Teacher in Higher Education Peter Knight and Paul Trowler: Departmental Leadership in Higher Education Peter Knight and Mantz Yorke: Assessment, Learning and Employability Ray Land: Educational Development John Lea et al.: Working in Post-Compulsory Education Mary Lea and Barry Stierer (eds): Student Writing in Higher Education Dina Lewis and Barbara Allan: Virtual Learning Communities Ian McNay (ed.): Beyond Mass Higher Education Elaine Martin: Changing Academic Work Louise Morley: Quality and Power in Higher Education Lynne Pearce: How to Examine a Thesis Moira Peelo and Terry Wareham (eds): Failing Students in Higher Education Craig Prichard: Making Managers in Universities and Colleges Stephen Rowland: The Enquiring University Teacher Maggi Savin-Baden: Problem-based Learning in Higher Education Maggi Savin-Baden: Facilitating Problem-based Learning Maggi Savin-Baden and Kay Wilkie: Challenging Research in Problem-based Learning David Scott et al.: Professional Doctorates Peter Scott: The Meanings of Mass Higher Education Michael L. Shattock: Managing Successful Universities Maria Slowey and David Watson: Higher Education and the Lifecourse Colin Symes and John McIntyre (eds): Working Knowledge Richard Taylor, Jean Barr and Tom Steele: For a Radical Higher Education Malcolm Tight: Researching Higher Education Penny Tinkler and Carolyn Jackson: The Doctoral Examination Process Susan Toohey: Designing Courses for Higher Education Melanie Walker (ed.): Reconstructing Professionalism in University Teaching Melanie Walker and Jon Nixon (eds): Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World Diana Woodward and Karen Ross: Managing Equal Opportunities in Higher Education Mantz Yorke and Bernard Longden: Retention and Student Success in Higher Education
Academic Research and Researchers Edited by Angela Brew and Lisa Lucas
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First published 2009 Copyright © Angela Brew and Lisa Lucas 2009 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN–13: 978–0–33–523606–0 (pb) 978–0–33–523607–7 (hb) ISBN–10: 0–33–523606–5 (pb) 0–33–523607–3 (hb) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data applied for Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in the UK by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow
Fictitious names of companies, products, people, characters and/or data that may be used herein (in case studies or in examples) are not intended to represent any real individual, company, products or event
Contents
Notes on contributors Foreword by Peter Scott Introduction: academic research and researchers Angela Brew and Lisa Lucas Part I The politics and culture of university research 1 Academic un-freedom in the new knowledge economy Margaret Thornton 2 Research quality assessment: objectives, approaches, responses and consequences Ian McNay 3 The structure of academic research: what can citation studies tell us? Malcolm Tight 4 Research management and research cultures: power and productivity Lisa Lucas 5 Creating collaboration: an exploration of multinational research partnerships Betty Rambur 6 Producing researchers: the changing role of the doctorate Alison Lee and David Boud Part II Researcher experiences and identities 7 Balancing different audiences: experiences of Dutch academics Liudvika Leisˇyte˙ , Jürgen Enders and Harry F. de Boer 8 Post-colonial perspectives on interdisciplinary researcher identities Catherine Manathunga
vii xiii 1 13 19 35 54 66 80 96 109 117 131
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9 ‘You do it from your core’: priorities, perceptions and practices of research among Indigenous academics in Australian and New Zealand universities Christine Asmar, Ocean Rı¯peka Mercier and Susan Page 10 Isn’t research just research? What are candidates and supervisors thinking? Margaret Kiley 11 Learning to be a researcher: challenges for undergraduates Mari Murtonen and Erno Lehtinen 12 Understanding academics’ engagement with research Angela Brew and David Boud 13 Conclusion: directions for future research Angela Brew and Gerlese S. Åkerlind Index
146 161 175 189 204 219
Notes on contributors
Gerlese S. Åkerlind, PhD, is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods (CEDAM) at The Australian National University (ANU). The Centre provides academic development support for academic staff at the ANU, and Gerlese convenes their Masters of Higher Education for academic staff. Her research and scholarship has primarily focused on the nature, and changing nature of higher education and academic work. This includes investigation of the academic experience of teaching, research, academic freedom, academic development and career development for early-career academics. She is an honorary Research Associate of the Oxford Learning Institute, Oxford University, and a member of the Editorial Boards for the journals, Educational Research Review, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, and International Journal of Researcher Development. Christine Asmar, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research on issues of cultural difference in higher education, including Muslim student experiences, has resulted in several articles and chapters. She is now collaborating with Indigenous colleagues (Susan Page and O. Rı¯peka Mercier) in examining Indigenous academic roles in Australia and New Zealand. She holds an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Teaching Fellowship. David Boud is Professor of Adult Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a Senior Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC). He has written extensively on teaching, learning and assessment in higher and professional education. More recently, his research has focused on learning in organisations and doctoral education. His most recent books (with various other authors) are Productive Reflection at Work: Learning for Changing Organizations, and Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education:
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Learning for the Longer Term. Changing Practices in Doctoral Education (edited with Alison Lee) was published by Routledge in 2009. Angela Brew, PhD, is a Professorial Fellow in the Learning and Teaching Centre at Macquarie University, Australia, a National Teaching Fellow of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) and Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Sydney. Her research on the nature of research and human knowing and its relationship to teaching has been published widely. Her books include The Nature of Research: Inquiry in Academic Contexts; Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide; and Transforming a University: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Practice. She is an elected Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), a Fellow of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and co-editor of the International Journal for Academic Development. Harry F. De Boer is a senior researcher at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. His research interests in the field of higher education studies concern governance and steering models at the system level, institutional governance, management and leadership issues in professional organizations, strategic planning, decision-making and policy analysis. He frequently publishes in these and other areas in the journals Higher Education, European Journal of Education, Higher Education Research and Development, Public Administration and Tertiary Education and Management. Jürgen Enders is Professor and Director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is a member of the editorial board of the book series Higher Education Dynamics and the journal Higher Education. He is a member of various (international) advisory and review councils (e.g. with respect to the German Excellence Initiative). His research interests are in the areas of the political sociology of higher education, governance and management of higher education and research, higher education and the world of work, and the academic profession. He has written and (co-)edited numerous books and published articles in journals such as Higher Education, Higher Education Policy, Leviathan, Public Administration, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia, and Scientometrics. Margaret Kiley is a researcher at the Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her research interests include research education and policy, research supervision, and student learning in research. She has published in the area of student mobility, examination of doctoral dissertations and conceptions of research. She is one of the founding organizers of the biennial Quality in Postgraduate Research conferences since their inception in 1994 and she has co-edited their proceedings. At the Australian National University, she works with staff involved in supervising research students from honours through to doctorates.
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Alison Lee is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research in Learning and Change at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has researched and published extensively on higher and professional education, with a particular focus on doctoral education, including doctoral supervision and professional doctorates, and the changing relations between the university and the professions. She brings poststructuralist and discourse-analytic perspectives to bear on questions of knowledge, practice and identity in higher education. Erno Lehtinen is Professor of Education at the University of Turku, Finland, and is currently the Vice-Rector of the University. He has studied the early development of mathematical skills, technology-based learning environments, conceptual change problems in advanced learning tasks, and new forms of expertise in technology-rich and networked environments. He has published about 280 scientific publications, edited several books and been quest editor of special issues of international journals. He was the President of the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) 2001–2003. Liudvika Leisˇyte· is Research Associate at the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, and Postdoctoral Fellow, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, USA. Her research interests include higher education and research policy, higher education governance and management, as well as academic practices from a comparative perspective. She has written two monographs: Higher Education Governance in Lithuania since 1990 (2002) and University Governance and Academic Research (2007) and has co-authored chapters in books and articles on European higher education reforms in Higher Education Policy, Higher Education and Public Administration. Lisa Lucas, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Education at the Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol, UK. She has researched widely on the organization, funding and development of higher education in a global context, including international comparative work on the funding and evaluation of research within universities and the link between research and teaching. Her book The Research Game in Academic Life was published by McGraw-Hill/Open University Press in 2006. She has published a number of journal articles, including in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education and The Journal of Further and Higher Education, and chapters in edited books, including, Reclaiming our Universities from a Runaway World (Walker and Nixon, 2004) and Beyond Mass Higher Education (McNay, 2006). Catherine Manathunga, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education in the Graduate School and the Teaching and Educational Development Institute (TEDI) at the University of Queensland, Australia. She provides professional development programmes for postgraduate supervisors and students and
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researches in the areas of doctoral education, interdisciplinary research and the history of teaching and learning. Her research is funded by the Australian Research Council, the University of Queensland and a range of industry partners. She has also acted as an educational consultant to several Australian universities and a number of universities internationally. Ian McNay is Emeritus Professor, Higher Education and Management, University of Greenwich, London. He has worked previously in a variety of institutions across Britain, and in Brussels and Barcelona, and run projects and programmes in over 25 countries around the world. His research interests are in policy analysis, strategic management of universities, values and institutional cultures. He led a major review for the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) of the impact of the Research Assessment Exercise, and served as a sub-panel member for the 2001 exercise. Ocean Rı¯peka Mercier, PhD, is a lecturer at Te Kawa a Ma¯ ui (Ma¯ ori Studies), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her teaching and research examine the interactions between science and Indigenous knowledge. In addition to her research with Christine Asmar and Susan Page on the Indigenous academic experience, she helped create Te Whata Kura Ahupu¯ ngao, an online physics learning resource in the Ma¯ ori language. Mari Murtonen, PhD, works as a senior researcher at the Faculty of Education and the Centre for Learning Research at the University of Turku and is an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her areas of interest include university students’ learning of research methods, teaching at university, development of expertise and learning theory. She has published articles and edited books both in Finnish and internationally. Susan Page is an Indigenous Australian. She is a currently Associate Professor and Director of Warawara Department of Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Her earlier research focused on Indigenous student experiences in higher education and she has more recently been investigating Indigenous academic experiences in Australia and New Zealand (with Christine Asmar and O. Rı¯peka Mercier). Betty Rambur is Dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Vermont, USA. She received her PhD in nursing from Rush University in Chicago, Illinois, and maintains an active research programme primarily focused on health services. In 2007, her research was honoured by Sigma Theta Tau International. In 2007–08, Dr. Rambur was selected from a national pool as an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow, a leadership development programme preparing select individuals for senior leadership in university administration. Her work in multinational collaboratives was one focus of her fellowship year.
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Peter Scott has been Vice-Chancellor of Kingston University, UK, since January 1998. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2007 New Year Honours list for services to higher education. Previously he was Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Education at the . He was also the Director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Education. From 1976 to 1992 he was Editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement. Recipient of numerous honours and awards, his personal research focuses on the development of mass higher education systems in their social, economic and cultural contexts; new patterns of knowledge production, and implications for knowledge-based organizations; governance and management of higher education institutions, and implications for the organizational culture of universities and the internationalization of higher education. Margaret Thornton is Professor of Law and ARC Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her research interests include discrimination law, the legal academy, the legal profession and feminist legal theory. A common thread in her recent work addresses the impact of neoliberalism and the new knowledge economy. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. Malcolm Tight is Professor of Higher Education at Lancaster University, UK, where he directs the doctoral programme in higher education. His research is currently concerned with the structure of the field of higher education research internationally, and with the development of higher education in the United Kingdom since 1945. He previously worked at the University of Warwick, Birkbeck College London, and the Open University. He is the editor of Studies in Higher Education.
Foreword Peter Scott
The place of research within the contemporary university has never been more pervasive – but in two different, almost contrary, senses. The first is that research performance – or, at any rate, research prestige, which is not necessarily the same – has become the dominant criterion of institutional, and individual, success. Global league tables are denominated almost exclusively in terms of research rankings as are national hierarchies of universities while individual careers are made, and unmade, by research reputations. Research looms larger in the mass higher education systems of the twenty-first century, it seems, than it ever did in the elite university systems of the past. But the second sense in which research has become pervasive is that it has infiltrated university teaching, even in the first years of undergraduate courses which now expect students to be able to demonstrate ‘research’ skills and habits. Research (and, in particular, its applications) has also become the principal channel through which universities demonstrate their utility to their communities, and to wider society; older cultural linkages have atrophied to be replaced by research–technology–innovation chains. In both cases, of course, there have been reverse movements. Teaching has infiltrated research back, no longer simply in terms of research training but within the wider arenas of evaluation and dissemination. At the same time ‘society has spoken back to science’ – and powerfully (Nowotny et al. 2001). The result is a puzzling paradox. On the one hand, research has become more sharply delineated, and distinguished from other forms of academic work – in terms of funding and management, organization and culture, even careers and identities. It has become harder shelled. But, on the other hand, in cognitive and normative terms, research has become more diffuse, and the boundaries between science and technology, scholarship and teaching (and learning), research and enterprise have become more open. It has become softer centred. Which of these imperatives, the managerialorganizational or the cognitive-normative, is likely to prevail? The answer will determine whether the future will see the closure of research agendas, as institutional research structures harden and the processes of scholarly and
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scientific enquiry become more regulated, or the opening-up of university research, its extension into wider intellectual territories, more creative but more chaotic. There are several reasons for the increasing weight attached to research in organizational and managerial terms, which are explored in this book: 1 Globalization: The first is the impact of globalization – or, more accurately, of a particular form of globalization in which the unregulated interplay of markets, especially financial markets, has been privileged. (There are alternative forms such as the potential for global solidarities of the underprivileged and the clear-and-present threat of global resistances by the oppressed, and the angry, who have been largely excluded from the dominant discourse of globalization – and, as a result, have struggled to establish their presence in research agendas.) Globalization, in this form, has intensified the competition between universities in a number of ways. First, the prevailing ideology, enthusiastically espoused by the World Bank and some other international agencies, has promoted free-market modernization which emphasizes research production, as well as skills formation, as the primary purposes of the modern university to the exclusion of other social, intellectual and cultural agendas. Next, under the influence of an associated discourse, that of the knowledge economy/ society, governments now regard their universities as key agents for securing competitive advantage; and research performance has generally been seen as a key component of such advantage even if the links between Nobel Prizes and GDP growth remain largely unexplored. Finally, universities themselves now compete for students (especially PhD students and also young researchers) as well as collaborating in major research projects, in an international market-place which is largely unregulated by public authorities. 2 Neo-liberalism: Closely linked to globalization (and the discourse of the knowledge economy/society) is the predominance of neo-liberal ideology. The emphasis this ideology – now under a cloud as a result of the international banking crisis and resultant recession – places on the ‘free’ market, and its disdain for national planning and the wider ‘social dimension’, have tended to privilege the contribution that research performance (and prestige) make to building university ‘brands’, which enable them to compete more effectively, and also the contribution that the commercial potential of research production can make to the financial strength of universities as ‘knowledge businesses’. The result is likely to be an erosion of the autonomy of individual researchers, and research teams, as corporate priorities are imposed – and significant threats to academic freedom may also arise (most immediately, and intensely, in defence- and pharmaceuticals-related research). 3 ‘New public management’: Closely linked to neo-liberal ideology is the socalled ‘new public management’, the substitution of corporate and commercial notions of leadership, governance and management for the more
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distributed, collegial and professional patterns of decision-making which traditionally prevailed in the public sector (and notably in higher education). The result has been to produce much tighter management of research (although it is important to recognize that more traditional patterns of professional – professorial? – authority in university research were often intensely hierarchical). In research, the ‘new public management’ has encouraged the spread of a more performative and evaluative culture, made possible by the exploitation of existing tools such as the systematic use of citation indices and of the development of new tools, such as successive Research Assessment Exercises in the United Kingdom. These tools have themselves then been used to justify the tighter, and top-down, management of research in universities, which has been readily accepted in engineering, technology and other applied sciences and (most) natural sciences but resisted in the social sciences and humanities. The cumulative effect of these, and other, phenomena has been to produce a disarticulation of academic work. Just as the ‘public intellectual’ has become a threatened species, outside the intense and distorting spotlight of mass media culture, so the ‘academic’, who teaches students, undertakes research and contributes to the wider life of her/his university, has now been placed on the defensive. University teaching itself has become an increasingly professional – and professionalized – activity; and institutional life is now largely dominated by corporate leaders (assisted, eagerly, by professional managers). But the major phenomenon has been the emergence of distinctive – and separatist? – research careers. This applies equally to senior professors now redefined as either research ‘stars’ or research entrepreneurs (or ideally both) and to junior researchers who often no longer aspire to follow more comprehensive academic careers, which in any case are no longer available to them. This apparently relentless division of academic labour, reinforced by the corporate trends which have been briefly described, has led to a profound transformation of professional identities – inimical, it is argued, to free and wide-ranging (and critical) intellectual enquiry, however effective in terms of scientific production. Powerful as these (largely but not exclusively) external forces have been in shaping the university research system, they have been confronted by counter-forces which have arisen from within the inner worlds of academic disciplines, and from the dynamics of contemporary research practice. These forces can be categorized under two main headings: (1) changes in how the nature of research (and teaching) are conceptualized (or theorized); and (2) associated, but not identical, changes in the practice of research (and teaching). Under the first heading cluster a number of competing conceptualizations. Some reinforce the development of research as a quasiindustrial process, such as the idea of the so-called ‘Triple Helix’ which emphasizes the three-way engagement between higher education, government and industry in the research process (Etzkowitz 2008). Others offer more open accounts of research, for example, the idea of ‘Mode 2’
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knowledge which is trans-disciplinary, socially (as well as spatially) distributed and deeply contextualized (Nowotny et al. 2003). But most of these reconceptualizations have in common a view of research as no longer a closed system determined and dominated by traditional scientific and scholarly communities predominantly located within universities; they tend to subvert established taxonomies of disciplines; and they see research as embodied in people and processes as much as outputs, products or artefacts. Similar changes can be observed in how teaching (and learning) in higher education are conceptualized. The momentum towards active learning by students with the ‘teachers’ redefined as facilitators or orchestrators has superseded more traditional models of pedagogy. Equally significant changes have taken place in the practice of university research (and teaching). At the postgraduate level the conventional distinction between ‘taught courses’ and ‘research degrees’ has been eroded, as more research elements have been included in ‘taught’ Master’s programmes and traditional PhD programmes have been supplemented by the development of professional doctorates which include significant elements of teaching and/or practice (and PhDs themselves have been broadened to include not only more systematic development of research skills but also the deliberate inculcation of wider life-skills for the benefit of the increasing number of students who, willingly or unwillingly, will follow more diverse careers; and the growth in part-time PhDs has also tended to broaden their scope because the mainly older students who are attracted by these programmes have different and distinctive motivations, more akin perhaps to those of traditional adult education students). At the undergraduate level, significant research projects have been introduced into the curriculum in many, indeed most, academic disciplines. These changes reflect the increasing demand, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, for graduates who have been educated to think and act as ‘researchers’ in their future careers in a wide array of professions and occupations which now require such qualities. In the knowledge society, many more organizations, whether in the public or the private sector, need to develop a more explicit research capacity in order to survive and succeed. They need to become ‘learning organizations’ in which research, education and organizational development are melded together. The cumulative effect of these changes, conceptual and practical, has been to promote the reintegration of ‘academic work’, albeit in novel and fluid configurations, by dissolving the conventional distinctions between research, teaching and the other elements within the missions of universities. In intellectual and normative terms the modern university has become a transgressive institution characterized internally by fuzzy categories (between disciplines and between different forms of ‘academic work’) and by permeable frontiers with the ‘external world’ (to the extent that a valid distinction can still be made between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’). Yet in the context of national policies (typically justified by the imperatives of global competition) and consequently in managerial and organizational terms, the
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same university is being driven into establishing ever fiercer institutional priorities – strategies and divisions, of labour internally and also into accepting more rigid rankings, more explicit differentiation of institutional missions and – inevitably – more pernicious hierarchies. Paradoxically, it is the demands of research which appear to be driving both these, apparently contradictory, phenomena. But it is a paradox which universities will have to learn to accommodate. Neither phenomenon is likely to diminish significantly. The first, the trend towards the more corporate management of research under conditions of increasing institutional (and national) competition, may be qualified to some extent if the current crisis in the neo-liberal world order leads to a significant backlash against ‘market’ policies in public policy and if the rather limited conception of the knowledge economy – focused on the instantaneous manipulation of massive data sets of (mainly) financial and other ‘market’ information and the world-wide dissemination of global brands and images through the mass media – is succeeded by a more open and liberal conception of a knowledge society. The second, the trend towards novel and fluid configurations of academic work (and, more broadly, intellectual and cultural life) which cannot be reduced to conventional categories such as research, teaching, enterprise and the rest – is likely to intensify. Despite the drive towards more corporate research management to improve research performance, these new configurations are already being reflected in new organizational structures, and career patterns and identities, within universities. However, paradoxes are not new to universities. The nature of university research has constantly evolved, from a chilly reluctance to accept that empirical and experimental research (as opposed to speculative scholarship) had a proper place in the university in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through a stable co-existence (if not harmony) between research and teaching in the twentieth-century university to the current imbalance in favour of (over-managed) research. Each generation has had to reach its own accommodation. There is no reason to believe that the current generation, however splintered between corporate academic leaders and managers, mainstream academics and younger researchers, will be less successful. This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of these issues. Although the overall tension between managerial/organizational and cognitive/normative trends within university research is a general phenomenon common to nearly all higher education systems, how this tension is played out is significantly affected by local environments, both policy contexts and disciplinary cultures. Consequently the finer-grain and multidimensional analyses offered by this book are of particular value. These analyses are also timely, because many governments are developing new research assessment systems or are modifying existing ones and because institutions themselves are developing more explicit, and active, research strategies. This book, therefore, has a major contribution to make not only to
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our academic understanding of the future of university research but also to the key policy choices faced by governments, higher education and research systems and individual institutions.
References Etzkowitz, H. (2008) The Triple Helix: University–Industry–Government Innovation in Action. London: Routledge. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2003) ‘Mode 2’ revisited: the new production of knowledge, Minerva, 41: 179–94.
Introduction: academic research and researchers Angela Brew and Lisa Lucas
Academic research in context The aim of this book is to bring together scholarly work that has investigated, empirically and theoretically, the position of research as a phenomenon in higher education. We aim to reflect contemporary debates and issues with regard to academic research and to illustrate a range of theoretical approaches to understanding it. This book highlights challenges and contradictions arising from investigations into different facets of research in universities, and from explorations into how academics negotiate ways through complex and often competing agendas. Our concern is with research carried out in universities. We do not intend to map the wider territory of research conducted, for example, in industry, government departments, the media and the like, nor are we concerned to provide an extended list of ways in which research might be experienced by different sectors of the population. Our aim is a more modest one. We aim to explore what is potentially a considerable field of study; to present snapshots of the work currently being carried out to investigate the nature of academic research, as illustrations of the field, and to raise issues that underscore challenges in understanding it. Research is of central political, cultural and economic importance for nations. It is, and indeed has for long been, a central activity of universities as well as an important contributor to how the world is understood by the population at large. In the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, university academics engaged in scholarship and in teaching small groups of undergraduates in elite universities. In the UK, Newman’s (1931) vision of the sacred relationship between tutor and student with a primary concern with teaching rather than research as the central duty of academics was influential in constructing the ‘Oxford model’. Nineteenth-century German universities, under the influence of Alexander Von Humbolt, were established with an emphasis on the unity of knowledge, well-funded laboratories and practical seminars with research and teaching going hand in hand.
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The scientific research laboratory concentrated critical resources necessary for research progress. The organization of research teams around powerful professors and strong attention given to the training of new researchers (Sutherland 1994, p. 40) made it possible for Germany, for example, to turn its universities, and university research in particular, to their service, whether for the development of industry or for the purposes of war (Brew 2001). In the latter years of the nineteenth century, although growing concern was expressed in Britain, for example, about the ‘majesty of German knowledge’ and the paucity of its own university education and research training (Haines 1969, p. 99; Simpson 1983), it was the First and Second World Wars which brought home the need for public investment in research. Such public investment was linked to the need to underpin industry and the economy (Sutherland 1994). By the end of the nineteenth century the idea of advancing knowledge through research had also taken hold on academic life in America (Van Ginkel 1994). Influenced by the German system of higher education where research was pursued as a primary goal, the PhD and research training began to be seen as a key to university life. In the USA, the idea of research as a primary activity gained ground in the early part of the twentieth century. It was fuelled by the usefulness of scientific research to the government particularly with the establishment of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War (Boyer 1990). Clark Kerr’s (1963) idea of the ‘multiversity’ was predicated on concerns with the ‘usefulness’, ‘relevance’ and ‘purposes’ of universities and university research (Lucas 2006). These events established that government investment in research was important; both the amount of investment and the type of investment. Governments became interested in funding research that had some kind of national benefit. The link between academic research and economic interest has intensified over recent years, leading to a greater investment in university research, particularly in the highly developed nations who have been keen to maintain their competitive economic edge. The amount of money invested in research, particularly in the countries within the Organization for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD) collective, has increased exponentially in recent years. The OECD area accounts for approximately 80 per cent of research and development (R&D) expenditure in the world. The average gross domestic expenditure on R&D in these countries increased from 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1981 to 2.3 per cent of GDP in 2003 (Vincent-Lancrin 2006). A significant change also identified by Vincent-Lancrin (2006), in his study of OECD countries, is the ‘massification of academic research’, which, he argues, is evidenced by the increase in academic research being done in universities (compared to other sectors), coupled with a large increase in the number of researchers and research outputs; primarily in the form of scientific articles. Alongside this intensification has been an increasing differentiation within national higher education systems with a propensity to encourage the devel-
Introduction 3 opment of elite ‘world-class’ institutions, that can compete on the global stage (Deem et al. 2008). The development of international league tables of universities has served to fuel this global competition, influenced mainly by the Shanghai Jiao Tong (2007) rankings in China, and the UK Times Higher Education Supplement (THES 2006) rankings. It can be argued that at ‘both national and regional scales, higher education has become firmly incorporated into a neo-liberal discourse of “global competitiveness” ’ (Robertson and Keeling 2008, p. 221). However, competition is not the whole story. It goes hand in hand with cooperation on a large scale. Robertson and Keeling (2008) go on to argue that there is a substantial global interconnectedness to be theorized in relation to higher education policy developments. An example of this would be the creation of the European Research and Innovation Area (ERIA) as a means to further Europe’s quest to compete internationally (European Council 2000). The examples of large European funded projects, such as Framework 6, serve to define common aims for the European science agenda and ensure collaborative activity of scientists across Europe (Peters 2006). How academics negotiate demands to engage in international collaboration are discussed by Betty Rambur in Chapter 5. In recent years, we have increasingly come to experience governments’ attempts to control research agendas through research councils with government-appointed directors; through mechanisms for assessing research quality and quantity; and in defining priority areas for research, backed by output-driven funding regimes. These regimes differ in important ways in different countries; different emphases being placed on measurement and feedback as Ian McNay illustrates in his cross-national comparison of research assessment in Chapter 2. However, government control is supported by implicit assumptions in these regimes that it is possible to ‘manage’ research by defining research outcomes in advance of doing the research, and to tie academics into a culture of ideas about what research is, and how to define it. Research has thus become a highly ‘contested space’ (Brew 2001, p. 5). A number of accounts of the changes that have taken place in universities in the past 20 years or so have tended to be theorized as being a consequence of the encroaching neo-liberal agenda within universities (see, for example, Slaughter 1993; Marginson and Considine 2000; Clegg 2008). Davies (2005), for example, suggests that the effects of neo-liberal discourses are dangerous and hinder academics’ capacity to resist. The consequences of neo-liberal and market-driven agendas are extremely complex and raise many important questions about the changing nature of the academic workplace. In Chapter 1, Margaret Thornton suggests that neo-liberalism erodes the idea of the university as contributing to the public good. It is clear that changes to the ways in which research is measured, evaluated and funded since about the late 1980s have had serious consequences for universities and for the academic role. The assumptions that are made about whether and how research can be measured have raised important questions about academic autonomy. In many cases, no longer is it up to individual
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academics to decide for themselves what to research. The need to ensure greater funding levels for research and to conform to expectations required for national funding and evaluation systems raises many questions for academics about what kind of research can and cannot be carried out. In Chapter 7, for example, Luidvika Leisˇye˙ and colleagues discuss different ways that Dutch academics balance the needs of different stakeholders to hold on to their academic autonomy. Neo-liberalism on its own is insufficient to explain why particular individuals take up specific positions in different contexts with regard to research. So in this book we bring together a number of different theoretical perspectives on how academic research is understood in higher education in order to advance a more nuanced theoretical agenda that goes beyond explanations of the changes in universities as simply being a shift away from an idealized past (McMullen 2006). We see emerging from the research reported throughout this book much more complex and nuanced patterns. Indeed, the empirical work discussed raises important questions about university practices and procedures in the context of changes in the macro-context.
The field of academic research All of these aspects of contemporary life in the university affect what is understood by research, how research operates, how it is communicated and how it is enacted and experienced within the higher education context. It is therefore perhaps surprising that there is not a systematic and coordinated tradition of inquiry investigating these phenomena. Indeed, we have found that publications on such issues tend to be spasmodic, widely distributed within the academic literature and often intellectually isolated from each other. The aim of this book is to bring together work that can provide valuable insights into the complex circumstances and vexing questions impacting on academic research and researchers, in the hope that this might suggest the establishment of an important field of intellectual inquiry. There have been traditions that have looked at the nature of scientific investigation theoretically through the philosophy of science and empirically within the sociology of science, or science studies. Substantial bodies of work have, for example, examined disciplinary practices (Becher and Trowler 2001) and research community building in science laboratories (following Latour and Woolgar 1986). There is a vast body of work from within the sociology of science, the sociology of knowledge as well as a broad area of work looking at aspects of ‘knowledge production’ (Jacob and Hellstrom 2000); the interrelationship of knowledge production and society (Nowotny et al. 2001), and the relationship between teaching and research (Brew, 2006). However, much of this focuses primarily on scientific research rather than academic research more broadly, and the relationship between teaching and research (Brew 2006). All of this work is important as background to this book. It is work on which we draw and to which this book is closely related.
Introduction 5 However, there are a number of important and critical factors that make academic research particularly worthy of a central place in investigations at the present time. Indeed, in the historical and political context described above, the need to understand how academics and others think about the nature of research and how it relates to broader aspects of the academic role has now become acute. To understand the nature of research, we need to know a good deal more about different traditions of knowledge-building, to investigate theoretical drivers of research policy formation, to explore processes of reflexive discussion within disciplinary and interdisciplinary communities, and we need to draw on a range of theoretical and empirical resources to understand how academics negotiate ways through complex and competing research practices and policies. For this, we need a scholarship of academic research. It is important to be clear about what precisely we are referring to here. We are concerned in this book with empirical and theoretical studies of research as a social, cultural and political phenomenon and with the ways in which it is experienced by researchers. We refer to research as a phenomenon in higher education; not as attaching to a specific discipline or subject area. There is no doubt the potential for many different disciplinary perspectives on the issues discussed here, and indeed our contributors write from their own different disciplinary positions, but our aim is to present studies which have examined research and researchers as social phenomena more generally and from a range of different theoretical and empirical perspectives.
Negotiating knowledge Affecting and being affected by the changing nature of research in universities are ways in which academics are having to balance different understandings of knowledge. Changes in what is now understood as knowledge are affecting both institutional and academics’ identities. There is a curious paradox here. On the one hand, intellectual critiques of the nature of knowledge that have come about following the so-called ‘paradigm wars’ of the 1980s, where Enlightenment ideas were seriously and systematically questioned, have caused a crisis in what is understood by knowledge. Philosophically, rational accounts of the nature of knowledge can no longer be sustained. Theoretically, knowledge is recognized now to always reside within a particular context and that includes a context with a particular view about what knowledge is and about how to generate or obtain it. Yet in practice, different ideas about the nature of knowledge are negotiated on many different levels within universities, in research committees, research teams, and by individual academics making decisions about how to proceed (see Brew 2007). There is an almost insatiable demand for knowledge of every aspect of human existence generated through the media and sustained by
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governmental requirements for knowledge that will help to address the issues confronting nations. The world is hungry for facts at a time when intellectually there is scepticism about the nature of facts and when assumed facts are being overturned as fast as they are being generated. We live within a context where there is, on the one hand, a proliferation of different methodologies for research and different kinds of subjects for research and, on the other, a restricted view of the nature of knowledge and how research outputs can be demonstrated within national and often institutional policy. In contexts where processes for measuring, funding and rewarding research take little account of theoretical ideas about knowledge and knowing, there are a number of questions that need to be addressed about the generation of different kinds of knowledge. In short, the relationship of knowledge to research has not only become complex, it has also become problematic. How academics work within this context is illustrated forcefully by Christine Asmar, Ocean Mercier and Susan Page in Chapter 9 in discussing the ways in which Indigenous researchers are balancing Indigenous and Western knowledges in complex ways within their research programmes. Changing patterns of knowledge and knowing have effects on how academics understand their discipline and what disciplines are understood to be. Disciplinary cultures, according to Pinch (1990, p. 302) are not the ‘rigid, well-ordered, fixed bodies of knowledge which often get enshrouded in the structural institutions of universities and in research evaluation exercises, but [are] flexible resources which can be used for a variety of argumentative purposes’. As new disciplinary areas come into being, disciplines grow and merge with others. Academics are increasingly taking a reflexive approach to their disciplinary identity and in consequence inter-disciplinarity is becoming not a special case but rather a way of viewing what is happening more generally in the confluence of other academic areas as they grow and change (Brew 2008). Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) suggest that the growth of cross-disciplinary collaborative projects directed and evaluated not by scientific peers but by experts chosen by governments or research councils are undermining academic autonomy and creativity. Indeed, according to these authors, universities have lost the authority to decide what counts as knowledge. This work raises important questions about how academic researchers establish research programmes and negotiate their careers as researchers. There is evidence of a move in research agendas towards topics which academics believe have a greater chance of being funded (Lucas 2006) and so potentially a move away from basic to applied research and increasing commercialization of academic research (Bok 2003). These measures have tended to shift the locus of control away from the individual academic and research teams and to raise many issues about the effects of this shift; about how research agendas are skewed away from issues of fundamental importance and about academics’ identity as researchers. These issues have important consequences for the ways in which the doctorate, which represents the key way of training researchers, is being
Introduction 7 reconceptualized. In Chapter 6, Alison Lee and David Boud suggest there has been a shift away from a focus on the individual candidate and the thesis outcome in doctoral education to considerations of how the doctoral process supports the development of broader competencies of new researchers and of research cultures. Margaret Kiley in Chapter 10 examines different understandings of the nature of research of supervisors and postgraduate students and questions how they work with different ideas about research, and in chapter 11 Mari Murtonen and Erno Lehtinen highlight undergraduates’ limited understandings of why learning research methodology is important, and their scepticism about its future role in their professional lives. This work raises many questions about which kind of knowledge is to be valued and how to support students as they develop their research. Questions related to the formation of academics as researchers are also discussed in Chapter 12 when Angela Brew and David Boud raise questions about the priorities and practices of academics in research-intensive universities, some of whom choose not to follow a research career path despite encouragement and resources being available.
Issues of power and language As soon as we begin to talk of scholarly work in relation to research, we need to address some important sociolinguistic issues. The term ‘research’ carries with it a series of political and intellectual overtones. There are disciplinary differences here, but broadly speaking, the concept of ‘scholarship’ does not carry the status and performative agendas of ‘research’, nor the same senses of rigour, hierarchy or power. Yet we find that when we talk of putting together a book demonstrating the nature of research on research, the language becomes somewhat confusing. So we talk of a scholarship of academic research. Some work, which we would place within this field of study uses the term ‘science’ when the word ‘research’ would, in our view, be more appropriate. We believe that the privileging of science takes attention away from the phenomenon in higher education with which we are concerned. It repudiates research as a topic for investigation in its own right. However, we are aware that this is a contested issue. Using the word ‘science’ to refer also to the social sciences, humanities and the arts is complicated, and Harding (1991) suggests that the more the scientific discourse dominates research, the more difficult it is to make the case for funding humanities and social science research. She suggests that this leads to increased separation between physical sciences and other fields; between elite universities and others, between men (disproportionately located in physical sciences) and women and various racial groups. ‘The fault line cuts across traditional class, institutional and hierarchical lines, constructing a privileged enclave of market-related science policy makers and scientists’ (Slaughter 1993, p. 298). However, in an attempt to reclaim this agenda, Harding (1991) argues that
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the social and political nature of science and the fact that everything scientists do or think is part of the social world mean that there is a developing trend to view science as one of the social sciences and not the other way round as was traditionally the case (for further discussion, see Brew 2001). We are concerned to bypass such debates. Our focus is on ‘research’ as a field of study, and specifically, academic research; locating the discussion in the context of studies of higher education. When ‘research’ is the focus, there is no way questions about the relationship of research to political ideas, relationships of power and the interests of different groups can be avoided. Academic autonomy, for example, is critically related to how power issues are played out in academic settings, and this, as we have seen, has become increasingly problematic in a contemporary context (Brew 2007). Powerful groups can exploit research opportunities. Some research teams contain powerful individuals who have access to resources and these tend to be located within disciplinary areas that Becher (1989) refers to as convergent and urban (mostly the hard sciences). This might suggest that many academics are relatively powerless and that they have to give up any ideas of critique and academic autonomy. Ball (2000) has suggested that academics still do what they want to do, but they also do enough to satisfy their institutional managers ‘playing the game’, as it were, in order to avoid attention being focused on them. However, as we have argued above, and as the chapters in this book show, a complex pattern emerges from empirical studies of academics’ actual responses. Feminists have drawn attention to the ways in which research uses dominant masculinist discourses. Some have suggested that the discourse of ‘science’ and of ‘research’ are gendered discourses reflecting masculinist ideologies, values and culture and that the visual metaphors of light, illuminations and seeing that characterize Western epistemology are masculine metaphors (Brew 2001). A number of authors have pointed to the dominance of gendered discourses in research findings even when it is quite inappropriate (see, for example, Spanier 1995; Wertheim 1995). Other authors suggest that there is considerable evidence that women are excluded from data samples even when statements of results refer to the general population (see Belenky et al. 1986; Code 1991; Harding 1991). These authors also point to the ways in which labelling such research ‘feminist’ is a way of silencing women’s voices; treating this work as separate from the mainstream. We also note in discussing the literature on research productivity in Chapter 12 that men are more productive in research than women (see, for example, Xie and Shauman 1998; Valian 1999; Stack 2004; Fox 2005). Again there are some important underlying issues of power to be considered in a research programme focused on understanding the nature of research and researchers in higher education, of which this book is an example. Power struggles within academia have been evident for some time, as was theorized by Bourdieu (1988) among others. The role of research, however, in terms of ensuring prestige, status and indeed ‘symbolic value’ (Bourdieu 1988) for institutions and individual academics continues to
Introduction 9 intensify (Lucas 2006). The league tables referred to earlier are constructed primarily in relation to research prowess (Liu and Cheng 2005) and the notion of creating ‘world class’ institutions revolves around the idea of research excellence. To compete on the global as well as the national stage, requires what Marginson and Considine (2000) refer to as ‘research power’. Institutions and individual academics who are successful in research gain simultaneously in prestige, status and funding. Success in research has become the key to the symbolic and economic survival of many universities and academics across the globe. This makes the investigation of research and researchers in academic life of primary importance as we seek to better understand the significance of this phenomenon.
The structure of the book Chapters in Part I of the book explore the socio-political context and socio-cultural processes of university research: the economics of research funding and evaluation and the impacts of research policy on the development of research culture, including how universities support research. We move through macro issues affecting academic research to consider in more detail responses to changing research agendas by the academic community. Our concern is to present a range of perspectives on these issues. We explore the relationship of research to knowledge production, the effects of research assessment exercises on university organization and management of research, how successful multinational research collaborations occur, the effects of the neo-liberal climate on the academy, issues of research management, and the role of doctoral education in developing a research culture. It is clear that the institutional context strongly influences the formation of academic identity. It is also clear that considerable differences exist in the ways people respond to, and work within, their context. The meanings they attach to research depend on their responses to these contexts. Their responses also depend on the meanings these contexts make possible. We are interested in the changing relationships brought about by contemporary research agendas and the effects of these changes on academic identity. Therefore, the chapters in Part II illuminate how individuals in different university contexts and with different career orientations, interpret, experience and position themselves in relation to research in those contexts. Part II thus focuses on the ways in which research is understood by researchers, be they academics, research higher degree supervisors, or postgraduate or undergraduate students. It explores the effects of changing research policies on how academics view their academic autonomy; the effects of engaging in interdisciplinary research on academics’ identity; the ways in which Indigenous researchers make sense of their positioning within a context which has traditionally treated them as ‘Other’; the ways in which research higher degree supervisors and students think about research; how students view learning about how to do research; and the different ways that
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academics with and without strong research profiles position themselves. In short, we are concerned to explore the different ways in which people understand research within the complex cultures and interactions of the university environment.
Conclusion In bringing together scholarly investigations into the nature of research in higher education we have been challenged to search widely for work which illustrates, in different ways, a field of study which we think of as the scholarship of academic research. It is a field of study with many unanswered questions. We have found that hitherto many studies have been one-off pieces of work carried out by academics in diverse disciplinary areas, or by higher education administrators or policy-makers. We hope that this book will contribute to the consolidation of what we believe is an important field of investigation offering fascinating insights into one of the most important phenomena in higher education: the nature of research.
References Ball, S. (2000) Performativities and fabrications in the education economy: towards the performative society? Australian Educational Researcher, 27(2): 1–23. Becher, T. (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines, 2nd edn. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M., Goldberger, N. R. and Tarule, J. M. (1986) Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books. Bok, D. (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, trans. P. Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, University of Princeton. Brew, A. (2001) The Nature of Research: Inquiry in Academic Contexts. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Brew, A. (2006) Research and Teaching: Beyond the Divide. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brew, A. (2007) Academic autonomy and research decision-making: the researcher’s view, in M. Tight, C. Kayrooz and G. S. Akerlind (eds) International Perspectives of Higher Education Research, Vol. 4 – Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from United Kingdom and Australian Universities (pp. 47–64). Oxford: Elsevier. Brew, A. (2008) Disciplinary and interdisciplinary affiliations of experienced researchers, Higher Education, 56: 423–38. Clegg, S. (2008) Academic identities under threat? British Educational Research Journal, 34(3): 329–45.
Introduction 11 Code, L. (1991) What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Davies, B. (2005) Winning the hearts and minds of academics in the service of neoliberalism, Dialogue, 24(1): 26–37. Deem, R., Mok, K. H. and Lucas, L. (2008) Transforming higher education in whose image? Exploring the concept of the ‘world class’ university in Europe and Asia, Higher Education Policy, 21: 83–97. European Council (2000) Conclusions of the European Lisbon Council, 23–24 March, SN100/00. Retrieved 27 March 2009 from: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/ summits/lis1_en.htm Fox, M. (2005) Gender, family characteristics, and publication productivity among scientists, Social Studies of Science, 35(1): 131–50. Haines, G. (1969) Essays on German Influence upon English Education and Science, 1850– 1919. New London: Connecticut College. Harding, S. (1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Jacob, M. and Hellstrom, T. (Eds) (2000) The Future of Knowledge Production in the Academy. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Kerr, C. (1963) The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. and Woolgar S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Liu, N.C. and Cheng, Y. (2005) Academic ranking of world universities: methodologies and problems, Higher Education in Europe, 30(2): 1–14. Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (2000) The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMullen, C. (2006) Academic identity in the age of the knowledge economy, International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management, 6(3): 197–203. Newman, J. H. (1931) Select Discourses from the Idea of the University. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Peters, M. (2006) The rise of global science and the emerging political economy of international research collaborations, European Journal of Education, 41(2): 225–44. Pinch, T. (1990) The culture of scientists and disciplinary rhetoric, European Journal of Education, 25(3): 295–304. Robertson, S. and Keeling, R. (2008) Stirring the lions: strategy and tactics in global higher education, Globalization, Societies and Education, 6(3): 221–40. Shanghai Jiao Tong (2007) Academic ranking of world universities – 2007. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ranking2007.htm Simpson, R. (1983) How the PhD Came to Britain: A Century of Struggle for Postgraduate Education. Research into Higher Education Monographs, vol. 54. Guildford: Society for Research into Higher Education. Slaughter, S. (1993) Beyond basic science: research university presidents’ narratives of science policy, Science, Technology and Human Values, 18(3): 278–302. Spanier, B. B. (1995) Im/Partial Science: Gender Ideology in Molecular Biology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Stack, S. (2004) Gender, children and research productivity, Research in Higher Education, 45(8): 891–920. Sutherland, S. (1994) The idea of a university? In National Commission on Education and The Council for Industry and Higher Education (ed.) Universities in the Twenty-First Century: A Lecture Series (pp. 1–20). London: National Commission on Education and the Council for Industry and Higher Education. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/ content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/9c/75.pdf THES (2006) The Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings, 6 October. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: http://www.topuniversities.com/ worlduniversityrankings/results/2006/top_200_universities Valian, V. (1999) The cognitive bases of gender bias, Booklyn Law Review, 65(4): 1037–62. Van Ginkel, H. (1994) University 2050: The organization of creativity and innovation, in National Commission on Education and the Council for Industry and Higher Education (ed.) Universities in the Twenty-First Century: A Lecture Series (pp. 65–86). London: National Commission on Education and the Council for Industry and Higher Education. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/9c/ 75.pdf Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2006) What is changing in academic research? Trends and future scenarios, European Journal of Education, 41: 169–202. Wertheim, M. (1995) Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars. New York: Random House. Xie, Y. and Shauman, K. A. (1998) Sex differences in research productivity: new evidence about an old puzzle, American Sociological Review, 63(6): 847–70.
Part I The politics and culture of university research
The chapters in this section of the book are primarily concerned with research into the socio-political conditions that influence the organization and management of university research in the twenty-first century. They draw on a wide range of traditions from sociology, policy studies, citation studies and higher education. In unique and complementary ways, they provide illustrations of the debates and dilemmas surrounding academic research and raise important questions about the role of research in the modern university, the processes of globalization and internationalization, the influence of government policy and particularly national systems of research funding and evaluation and the impact of these on the governance and management of university research. These chapters also address problems associated with the cultures and values governing academic research and how these may be changing in light of the impacts of globalization, neo-liberal ideology and changing national systems of research funding and evaluation.
Globalization, the knowledge economy and national research policies Since the 1970s, academic research has been increasing across OECD countries, with more research being done in more institutions, with greater numbers of research staff and with greater volumes of research output (VincentLancrin 2006). However, as academic research is increasing, so too is research being done in other sectors, particularly business sectors, and the pressure is on for universities to demonstrate its ‘value added’ in the research work that it is undertaking (Vincent-Lancrin 2006). Furthermore, there is clear evidence of the commercialization of university research and a growing trend of universities being involved in competitive and quasimarket forces (Slaughter and Leslie 1999; Marginson and Considine 2000;
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Vincent-Lancrin 2006). Slaughter and Leslie (1999) argue that there has been a sustained move towards ‘academic capitalism’ within academic research as universities struggle to fund their research work. However, the extent of engagement in such ‘academic capitalism’ may vary across disciplines (Ylijoki 2003) reflecting different cost levels and cultures in different disciplines. However, as higher education systems grow, there is a greater need for new sources of funding to support them, particularly from private sources (Slaughter and Leslie 1999). The consequences of this are the primary concern of Margaret Thornton’s chapter and in particular, the neo-liberal infusion into university governance and management as well as the ‘governance of self’ (Rose 1996) of academics working within institutions who submit to this neo-liberal project. Her primary concern is with the autonomy of academic research and the extent to which this is being eroded by neo-liberal policies and the pressures of commercialization. She uses Beck’s (1992) work on risk to better understand the pressures of re-invention and entrepreneurial activity, which university managers face. She focuses on the key issues of academic performativity, the audit culture and academic freedom, concluding that there is currently a war raging over the debates and struggle over the ‘public means of knowledge production’, which perhaps needs a strong academic defence. Increased investment in research by national governments has been accompanied by ever more elaborate and invasive forms of monitoring and evaluation of research work. Indeed, the impetus for these systems of research evaluation and funding in countries like the UK, Australia and New Zealand began in the austere times of reduced funding to higher education in the move to a mass system, and it was argued that the efficiency of academic research had to be improved. Competitive systems of funding were introduced, therefore, in many countries to ensure selective funding of the most successful (Lucas 2006). Globalization has been argued to be the ‘transnationalization of the world’s economy in the area of markets, finance and communication’ (Delanty 2001, p. 116). However, it is a highly contested concept and produces significant potential contradictions, such as the idea of globalization as inducing a ‘market driven uniformity, homogeneity [and] standardization’ across nations, or conversely, as being associated with ‘fragmentation, plurality, even chaos’ (Delanty 2001, p. 116). There is certainly a case to show that the idea of standardization is increasing as international league tables serve as a proxy measure of the research ‘excellence’ of universities around the globe, despite critiques of the methodologies utilized (Liu and Cheng 2005). The need to look across national systems is important as it can shed new light on national policy issues and serves as a sharp reminder of the complexity and the variety of national higher education systems and the role, function and funding of academic research in different countries. VincentLancrin’s (2006) study of OECD countries clearly shows the differences and similarities across different nations and in particular, the significant role of
The politics and culture of university research 15 academic research. The diversity of systems of funding and evaluating university research across the globe from the continents of Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa, is taken up in Chapter 2. Ian McNay gives insight into the variety of systems, and highlights the importance of understanding the complexity of responses to the issue of how to evaluate and fund university research. He pays particular attention to those countries which have a national system of research funding and evaluation: the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, but also shows the different bases and justifications, that underpin these from the views of research managers. He argues that since having national systems is ‘not the norm’, then we may want to ask why some countries have adopted a national system and what the advantages are but also what the disadvantages might be. McNay also engages in the debates between a quantitative and a qualitative approach to research evaluation and also the significance of the link such evaluation has to the funding of institutions. He discusses the outcomes of forms of evaluation on institutional management, productivity, quality constraint, identity and enterprise, the knowledge agenda, value for money and the issue of journal jostling and bibliometrics.
Academic research networks, partnerships and practices In his (2006) study of OECD countries, Vincent-Lancrin identifies the increasing internationalization of academic research and explores the implications of this. One particularly interesting feature is the increase in international research collaborations, which he argues can be evidenced by the increase in the numbers of internationally co-authored publications. He maintains also that these international collaborations are happening not only within OECD countries but also include emerging and developing countries (VincentLancrin, 2006). It is important to recognize, however, that such partnerships may not be taking place on equal terms. As Vincent-Lancrin argues, the ‘OECD area produced 82% of the world output of scientific literature and accounted for 94% of citations in the world scientific literature’ (2006, p. 189). Peters talks of the emergence of a ‘world knowledge system’ (2006, p. 237) but it is of course important to remember the dynamics of power that operate with potential partnerships and collaborations whether they be local, national or international. The complexities of engaging in research partnerships, particularly those which are international, is addressed by Betty Rambur in Chapter 5. Her research enables a categorization of different research ‘collaboratives’, which demonstrate increasing levels of complexity in terms of organization and interaction. She gives useful examples to illustrate these different collaboratives and documents the experiences of the researchers involved. She also shows the links between involvement in research collaboration and ways in which this may support academics in their need to amass high level outputs
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in order to ensure tenure. However, for some academics, particularly more junior staff, research collaboratives may cause more difficulties and impede the necessary accumulation of work needed for tenure. This is an area in need of greater research and Rambur’s work is useful in beginning to chart the territory of work on research partnerships. The relevance of citation studies to national systems of funding and evaluation systems has been increasing where, for example, in both the UK and Australia, there is a move towards further reliance on quantitative bibliometrics to be used as a basis for funding. This system has been critiqued in a number of ways. However, it also holds potential as a means of investigating the collaborative efforts of academics both nationally and internationally. In Chapter 3, Malcolm Tight takes forward the work on citation studies and produces some interesting results in terms of enabling a greater understanding of research groupings and communities. Beginning with an exploration of the field of research into higher education, he goes on to explore other sub-disciplinary areas to reveal what citation and co-citation studies can illuminate about citation practices and ultimately the interconnection of researchers into groups and/or communities. One interesting finding from his preliminary work is that many academics work in relative isolation, suggesting a propensity for ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’ groupings to use Becher’s (1989) concepts. The complexities and limitations of using citation studies are also highlighted as are the implications this may have for greater use of bibliometrics in national systems of research funding and evaluation.
Academic research management, organization and culture The subject of management in higher education has received unprecedented attention since the 1980s as there has been a change to a mass higher education systems and increasing forms of national bureaucratic monitoring have been launched for both teaching and research in many countries. There has been a move from a perception of collegial relations in academia to one of management, although the modes of characterizing this management activity have been debated (Clegg and McAuley 2005; Deem et al. 2008). Chapter 4 looks in more detail at two national systems of research funding and evaluation, the UK and Australia. Lisa Lucas explores the development of these systems and the impact these have had on the organizational and cultural practices within university departments and the experiences of academic-managers in managing research. She looks at the explicit forms of management of research in relation to the organizational and cultural practices of two case study departments of education in one UK and one Australian research-intensive university. This chapter is concerned with questioning the impact of national policies on the institutional, organizational and cultural conditions of engaging in research, echoing concerns
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expressed by Margaret Thornton on the evaluative and performative focus of such policies and the impact on innovative and creative academic research. In particular, Lisa Lucas explores the relative potential of management and organizational research cultures within academic departments to employ strategies to monitor and control academic research practices as well as develop and enable such practices. This follows an interesting question of the extent to which departmental managers employ ‘research management’ or ‘research nurturing’ strategies (MacGregor et al. 2006). The formation of new academics and the role of doctoral education is central to the debates on academic cultures, particularly in terms of how we induct new researchers into these cultures (Deem and Brehony 2000). Alison Lee and David Boud in Chapter 6 are concerned with the formation of doctoral students into independent researchers. They argue that the ‘conditions and practices of university research’ are changing and that the practices of doctoral education also need to change to meet the new demands. Indeed, they argue for a shift in practices of the old apprenticeship model of informal relations between a supervisor and student to a more collectivized and improved pedagogically robust doctoral education that is able to develop the skills needed by doctoral candidates to survive in the constantly changing academic environment. In one case study example, discussed in this chapter, the focus is on practices which can enable doctoral students to publish in journals during their doctoral studies. This is a good example of the kinds of practical skills necessary for these students to develop and then be able to gain entry to the highly competitive ‘publish or perish’ world of academia. Another case study looks at ways to develop a ‘scientific mindset’ and a better understanding of the processes of critique used in academic work, through a ‘journal club’ where articles are routinely analysed and critiqued. Policies and practices informing doctoral education, therefore, are argued to be undergoing radical change, which is a necessary development to meet the demands for fully prepared early career academics to be successful in the modern university research environment.
Conclusion The chapters in Part I of this book give a rich and varied array of perspectives and ways of understanding the complex field of university research and the socio-political and socio-cultural drivers acting upon it. University research does not exist in an ‘ivory tower’ vacuum and indeed, quite the contrary, it is perceived as central to the social and economic development of society. As such, it becomes a site of struggle and tension between competing values, such as that between corporate/market versus academic values and government control versus ideals of autonomy and academic freedom. New light is shed on these issues alongside a better understanding of the complexities of research networks and partnerships and forms of research management and organization.
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References Becher, T. (1989) Academic Tribes and Territories. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter. London: Sage. Clegg, S. and McAuley, J. (2005) Conceptualising middle management in higher education: a multifaceted discourse, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 27: 19–34. Deem, R. and Brehony, K. (2000) Doctoral students’ access to research cultures: are some more unequal than others? Studies in Higher Education, 25(2): 149–65. Deem, R., Hillyard, S. and Reed, M. (2008) Knowledge, Higher Education and the New Managerialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delanty, G. (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Liu, N. C. and Cheng, Y. (2005) Academic ranking of world universities: methodologies and problems, Higher Education in Europe, 30(2): 1–14. Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. MacGregor, R., Rix, M., Aylward, D. and Glynn, J. (2006) Factors associated with research management in Australian commerce and business faculties, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 28(1): 59–70. Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (2000) The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, M. (2006) The rise of global science and the emerging political economy of international research collaborations, European Journal of Education, 41(2): 225–44. Rose, N. (1996) Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. (1999) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vincent-Lancrin, S. (2006) What is changing in academic research? Trends and future scenarios, European Journal of Education, 41: 169–202. Ylijoki, O.-H. (2003) Entangled in academic capitalism? A case-study on changing ideals and practices of university research, Higher Education, 45(3): 307–35.
1 Academic un-freedom in the new knowledge economy Margaret Thornton
[M]aking money in the world of commerce often comes with a Faustian bargain in which universities have to compromise their basic values – and thereby risk their very souls – in order to enjoy the rewards of the marketplace. (Bok 2003, p. 200)
Introduction: transformation Since the early 1970’s, the university has been transformed. For centuries, it was viewed as the custodian of culture, the seat of higher learning and the paradigmatic site of free enquiry. These lofty aims have been turned upside down by a constellation of values emanating from the interstices of neoliberalism, the new knowledge economy and globalization. The result is that the university is now regarded as a source of wealth creation to be exploited. As the market enters the soul of the university, it has caused the traditional values associated with the public good to contract. With government as the driver, universities have assumed more and more characteristics associated with private for-profit corporations. As a result, they have become hybrid institutions, no longer strictly public, albeit under the control of the state, but not altogether private either. Despite the extent of government control, these selfsame governments are now rejecting the discourse of the public in the public university. An observation in a government discussion paper on the future of higher education in Australia in 2008 graphically illustrates the point: ‘Indeed, the term “public” university now refers more to the historical circumstances at the time of foundation rather than the nature of institutional financing’ (DEEWR 2008, p. 10). With particular regard to research, I explore the ramifications of this metamorphosis. In addition to drawing on the contemporary literature and documentary evidence, I extrapolate from research findings that investigated the impact of neo-liberalism on the legal academy. In this Australian
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Research Council project, I conducted interviews with a range of academics, including deans and directors of research in law schools in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom. I suggest that a web of governmentality, in which supranational, national and academic subjects are enmeshed, has not only made resistance difficult, it militates against recuperation of the public good. I conclude that the domination of the market necessarily compromises freedom in both the conduct and outcome of research.
Knowledge capitalism As Lyotard (1984) observed, knowledge has replaced land, raw materials and cheap labour in the struggle for power among nation states. Knowledge and information are now the revolutionary trading commodities that form the basis of economies everywhere. The term ‘knowledge capitalism’ recognizes knowledge as the most significant form of global capital (Olssen and Peters 2005, p. 331). This reality was the basis of an influential OECD paper entitled The Knowledge-based Economy (1996). In addition to recognizing the need for skilled new knowledge workers, particularly in information and communications technologies, the paper also emphasized the need for investment in research and development (R&D). Universities, as key knowledge producers, were expected to play a central role in the economic revolution. However, vital knowledge cannot lie fallow within ivory towers. ‘Knowledge transfer’ must occur to disseminate the outcomes of the research and apply it to solving the problems of the wider society. Knowledge transfer is also the means by which universities demonstrate their relevance in order to justify continued financial support from the state. Subsequent OECD studies (e.g. Connell 2004, p. 17; Hazelkorn 2005) show how research has risen in importance across member states and is now central to the idea of the university as an entrepreneurial entity. The search for truth as a rationale for research in the university has been virtually erased. Moreover, it is not knowledge in general but particular types of researchbased knowledge that are in vogue. Technoscience is favoured as the most lucrative manifestation of academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie 1997), because it is believed to contain the key to solving society’s problems. As Lyotard put it, ‘what is of utmost importance is the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a problem “here and now” ’ (1984, p. 51). In contrast, the non-applied disciplines are deemed to lack use value within the market. The commodification of knowledge has been highly destabilizing for the humanities, the traditional core of the university, as well as for the social sciences and non-applied sciences, such as pure mathematics and physics. There have been endeavours to re-imagine the humanities and creative arts as ‘creative industries’ to comport with the new paradigm, but these initiatives have not been altogether successful (Bullen et al. 2004). It is
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the economic not the cultural value of the knowledge that is now valued most highly (Harris 2008, p.348).
Globalization Universities have traditionally operated within an international frame, and higher learning has similarly not been constrained by the borders of nation states. However, the advent of the new knowledge economy has resulted in novel incarnations of globalization that have profound ramifications for research (Arimoto 2005, p.2). Most significantly, the prosperity of nation states is contingent on a ‘competitive, knowledge-based global economy’ that will ‘increase the importance of higher education to the nation’ (DEEWR 2008, p. 1). The attempt to bind all research universities into a single system may be the most marked manifestation of the global revolution: ‘For the first time in history every research university is part of a single world-wide network and the world leaders in the field have an unprecedented global visibility and power’ (Marginson and van der Wende 2007, p. 3). Universities everywhere seek to emulate the top performers in a desperate endeavour to secure the ‘world class’ descriptor and scramble up the rankings ladder in the hope of securing an edge on their competitors in the market. The indirect effect of competition policy thereby has the propensity to erase distinctiveness and induce homogeneity because the assumption is that all institutions are producing the same product. The export of higher education services represents a significant plank in the commodification of higher education. It has contributed to a global market with globally mobile students. Marginson and van der Wende (2007, p. 23) show how this high foreign mobility in students, particularly at the doctoral level, is widening the gap between rich and poor countries. It has the effect of producing unbalanced global flows, with the United States being a ‘brain-gainer’ in relation to the rest of the world; a phenomenon that exercises a significantly deleterious effect on Third World and Asian countries (Huang 2005, p. 74). Globalization can therefore mean that First World knowledge continuously affects other national systems, whereas the reverse is not the case (Marginson and van der Wende 2007, p. 24). Globalization is also contributing to English becoming the lingua franca of scholarship, a phenomenon that is underscored by the increasing use of citation indices that are English language-based. In a global world dominated by market ideology, capital accumulation in the form of knowledge reifies Lyotard’s insight that knowledge is the new source of power for nation states.
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Risky business Uncertainty and insecurity, together with the constant need to reinvent the self, are dimensions of Ulrich Beck’s now classic work on the risk society (1992). Risk is an unavoidable state that accompanies the social production of wealth (Beck 1992, p. 19). The university, like other entrepreneurial entities must always be on guard against risk, a factor that weighs heavily in balancing competing pressures (Connell 2004, p. 20). If a venture fails because of what occurs on Wall Street or the international student market collapses due to the volatility of the local currency, the institution must be prepared to reinvent itself or face annihilation. The ghost of risk is said to ‘haunt’ the new knowledge economy, albeit rarely acknowledged in the dominant policy discourses (Bullen et al. 2006, p. 55). Because it is no longer stable and knowable, but infinite and unruly, knowledge itself is now a source of danger (Beck 1992, p. 183). As a corollary, relationships are uncertain (Sennett 1999); institutions are untrustworthy (O’Neill 2002; Gaita 2004); student/consumers are fickle (Giroux 2002); markets collapse, and technology renders everything perpetually obsolescent. Within this unstable environment, research is an investment that helps to safeguard the university against the risks associated with its other money-generating ventures, such as markets in education. The case studies provided by the OECD of different types of universities scattered throughout the world (Connell 2004; Hazelkorn 2005) are designed to provide advice to member states on strategic decision-making and best practice in the management of risk. For this supranational body, the question is how to be productive and maximize wealth in an environment beset with risk. In particular, how can higher education be restructured to become ‘a more effective and efficient economic driver’ (Hazelkorn 2005. p. 3)? In accordance with the governmentality thesis, the same question is echoed by nation states and universities, for there is now unanimity that producing knowledge with use value is their primary role.
Orchestrating new knowledge An entrepreneurial research culture Research was not a significant dimension of the traditional university. Newman, in his iconic work, The Idea of the University (1976), did not believe that research properly belonged in universities but in dedicated research institutes. In contrast, Humboldt, credited with being the father of the modern university, espoused the idea that the unity of teaching and research was a formative principle of the university (Cowan 1963, vol. x, p. 134). Karl Jaspers went further, contending that research was the foremost concern of the university because it was concerned with the pursuit of truth, the raison d’être of the idea of the university (1960, p. 21). Within the market paradigm, the idea
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has been completely disrupted, for it is no longer curiosity but the incomegenerating capacity of the research and its value to end-users that is the main incentive for conducting the research in the first place. Even basic, or ‘blue sky’ research, essential for scientific innovation, is giving way to more applied science and technology in research universities in the United States (Pusser et al. 2006, p. 747). In view of the centrality of research to the new knowledge global economy, contemporary governments have adopted a much more active role in the facilitation and production of research. The trend away from free enquiry to controlled research and problem-solving is one of the characteristics of knowledge production in contemporary society identified by Gibbons et al. (1994, p. 78). Competition policy has become the driver of research, which is carefully orchestrated by the state. As competition between nation states increases, the specifications laid down by government funding bodies have progressively become more prescriptive. The public funding of research is increasing in most OECD countries, which is generally allocated to designated priority areas (Connell 2004, p. 41). Competitive bidding for the money to undertake research enables governments to create a culture of compliance in order to devolve responsibility to universities (Marginson and Considine 2000, pp. 142–4). A guarantee to increase research may lead to more money for an institution. Canadian universities, for example, undertook to double the amount of research they produced and triple their commercialization within eight years for an additional financial investment (Rock 2002). Once university presidents sign on the dotted line, the burden of compliance is then passed down the hierarchical chain to individual units and academics. Resistance is not a viable option because unfunded research is held in low esteem in the new environment. As one legal academic put it: ‘You might do the most important research rather than the most funded research’, but it is the latter that has come to be valued more highly. At the same time as the neo-liberal state seeks to augment university research productivity through competitive funding and incentive schemes, it simultaneously seeks to pass the costs of research on to end-users, which has the added advantage of facilitating knowledge transfer. In collaborative research with industry, partners agree to provide financial and in-kind contributions supported by government funding and incentives. Through such schemes, governments seek to become ‘effective and efficient economic drivers’ in response to the exhortation of the OECD (Hazelkorn 2005, p. 3). Commercialization, then, is the nub of knowledge transfer. If industry funds research, the expectation is that it will take out patents and capitalize on the findings. This dimension of the privatizing imperative is exerting a profound effect on the nature of research as a public good.
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The pitfalls of commercialization The financial benefits that flow from the fruits of the research, including intellectual property (IP) not only strengthen the privatizing imperative but delimit academic freedom, an issue to which I shall return. Principals or industry partners may impose contractual conditions, including secrecy and delay in publication, as well as claims to the IP in any report produced, thereby preventing researchers from using the data for scholarly publication. Hence, although the research is conducted by publicly funded academics in so-called public universities, it may never see the light of day. Despite the hope that universities might benefit financially from patents, the university share has been quite small (OECD 1996, p. 35; Bok 2003, p. 77; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, p. 329). In the United States, the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 paved the way for the most extensive university/industry links of all OECD countries (Connell 2004, p. 43). The Act allowed the patenting and exploitation of IP produced by faculty members and legitimated the shift from pure to applied research. Designed to encourage technology transfer, exploitation of IP has had the effect of privatizing the result of research that would have once gone into the public domain for general and free use (Reichman and Dreyfus 2007, p. 113). As universities are still the primary producers of basic research, they can be deleteriously affected by the over-inclusive effects of patenting, which can create ‘broad rights over core methodologies and research tools’ (Reichman and Dreyfus 2007, p. 114), as it may be virtually impossible to disaggregate the various creative strands that go into a single invention. The techno- and bio-sciences may occasionally produce lucrative outcomes (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, p. 53), but conflicts of interest and disputes are all too familiar (e.g., Bok 2003, pp. 66–76). The evidence also suggests that the risks and costs of litigation are rising rapidly (Reichman and Dreyfus 2007, p. 103). Illustrative of these costly IP disputes is University of Western Australia v Gray (No 20) [2008] FCA 498, in which a dispute over the rights to cancer therapies raged for 20 years between the University of Western Australia (UWA) and a former professor of surgery. In a 544-page decision, Justice French held that the university’s policies claiming the right to assert ownership over its employees’ IP were invalid because the duty of an academic to conduct research did not include a duty to invent, a somewhat sophistical distinction. Although Dr Gray’s employment contract required him to ‘organise and generally stimulate research’ in his field of expertise, invention was found to be outside the scope of his employment. The case is inordinately complex, involving multiple researchers, companies and industry parties, in addition to building on 20 earlier court cases. No resolution is in sight as UWA has appealed the decision. The issue of whether an academic researcher has a duty to invent is one of great moment and is likely to continue to be hotly contested in the enterprise university. Nevertheless, the facts reveal how some academics have absorbed the entrepreneurial message only too well.
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Neo-liberal academic subjects Academic performativity Collegiality, which signified at least a modicum of autonomy for individual academics and for faculties in the past, has been significantly eroded, although research-intensive universities tend to exercise more independence than others (Marginson 2007, p. 6). Managerialism has replaced collegiality in the enterprise university: ‘The management of knowledge production and dissemination has become the core work of universities, repositioning academics as managed professionals’ (Blackmore 2003, p. 5). Supervisory schemes are now common in faculties whereby senior academics mentor junior academics and help to facilitate their research. In turn, senior academics are supervised by senior managers. In this way, a network of subinfeudation is set in place so that everyone simultaneously manages and is managed. A laissez-faire attitude towards research is no longer tolerated as all academics are expected to be ‘research active’ (Lucas 2006). To be classified as ‘research inactive’ may mean being quarantined in a ‘teaching only’ position as a form of punishment or even having to face redundancy. The inversion of teaching and research is a marked characteristic of the enterprise university. Neo-liberal academic subjects must constantly be seen to be performing in order to guard against redundancy. They must nevertheless embrace risk because it represents opportunity (Baker and Simon 2002, p. 20). Having absorbed the governmentality message that they govern the self, academics struggle to comply and secure the approbation of their institutions which depend on their collective efforts. Instead of only a national reputation, an international reputation is now mandatory in order to augment the positional goods of an academic’s institution and enhance its league table rankings on the global stage. The entrepreneurial research culture, which esteems ‘inputs’ – the money generated to undertake the research, more highly than ‘outputs’ – the publications and patents – that flow from the research is subtly changing the manner in which research is undertaken. Instead of the modest project, in which academic researchers undertake the research themselves, the ambit of projects has been expanded to justify applying for larger and larger grants to tackle multidisciplinary projects. Research teams may employ multiple research associates, technical assistants, managers and venture capitalists in order to undertake empirical data collection and cross-country comparisons. Academics must compete in order to survive, which means not only being more productive, but also being constantly prepared to reinvent the self within an unstable environment. Like the institutional entities in the new knowledge economy, academics are haunted by risk. Garrick and Clegg depict the transformation of the university as a tale of Gothic horror in which the institution transfuses the intellectual capital of academics and, once the
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transfusion has occurred, their vitality becomes vulnerable (2000). If they are not perennially engaged in the performative role of displaying their productivity in light of the latest mission statement, they run the risk of being ‘sucked dry, spat out, made anaemic and finally, redundant’ (Garrick and Clegg 2000, p. 154). Those academics who assume risk and accept their role as flexible neo-liberal subjects, and who agree to adapt to the ever-changing political prescripts, can expect to be rewarded.
The audit culture Haunted by risk, universities must be managed in multiple ways to minimize the ‘bads’. The audit explosion (Power 1997) is a manifestation of this new technology of governance. Power argues that auditing has moved out of the accountant’s office into the mainstream of public life to allay the mistrust and uncertainty about authority and control. Auditing schemes have become a persuasive means of measuring research productivity and ensuring compliance (Lucas 2006). In order to harness new knowledge and to guard against risk, a plethora of schemes has emerged in universities all over the world, such as the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) in the UK, the ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) and the PBRF (Performance Based Research Fund) in New Zealand. Mechanisms of audit emphasize performativity, which Lyotard (1984, p. 11) defines as the process of ‘optimisation of the relationship between input and output’. As suggested, academics must be seen to be performing, but performativity must be rendered calculable. That which is quantifiable is easier to measure than that which has no concrete outcome, such as thinking, despite being crucial to the research. Hence, preferred performance indicators include amount of grant income, numbers of publications and research higher degree completions. Citation indices as a measure of quality are commonly used in sciencebased disciplines, but not in the humanities where books are likely to be valued more highly than journal articles. Citation indices not only fix the managerial gaze permanently in the direction of technosciences, and the prospect of profits, but towards the northern hemisphere and Anglocentricity. In any case, the ranking of journals as an indicator of the excellence of their contents is clearly fraught. Student-edited law journals based at US Ivy League universities, such as Harvard and Yale, for example, are generally deemed to be the most prestigious, largely because of the age and standing of their host institutions, while others insist that only peer-reviewed journals should count. Even then, the downgrading of specialist journals, together with the virtual exclusion of journals in languages other than English, render such rankings ‘crude, inaccurate and harmful’ (Brennan and Malpas 2008). Global rankings unduly privilege the generalist above the specialist, and the ‘international’ above the local, thereby producing a manifestation of the colonial cultural cringe within nation states at the periphery. Web-based
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publishing also tends to be accorded short shrift. Metrics may thereby become a conservatizing mechanism for maintaining a status quo that extols the world’s oldest and most prestigious Anglo-American institutions. Despite its obvious failings, the calculability of auditing is seductive, for it augments the competitive ethos that now pervades universities. As ‘auditable, competitive performers’ (Shore and Wright 1999, p. 569), academics are always vying with others for success. In gearing up for the next round of competition for the additional government funding that may attach to a high ranking in a research assessment exercise, the norms of academic life are subverted. Research assessment becomes the driver of teaching policies, including course offerings and class sizes, as well as the institutional and individual choices regarding topic, type of research and publication destination. In encouraging competition, auditing corrodes the good of collegiality. In order to maximize the ranking of a school, a decision may have to be made as to which members of the school should be included in the audit. This may entail a single person, or sometimes a small panel of academics, reading their colleagues’ work, ranking it and deciding whether it comports with national standards of excellence. If not, it is excluded from the audit. While some academics are philosophical about auditing, others are scathing and embittered, especially when the rankings are made public. These ‘shallow rituals of verification’ (Power 1997), far from allaying mistrust and uncertainty, may serve to generate an ‘expanding spiral of distrust’ (Rose 1999, p. 155).
Academic freedom Academic freedom has been recognized as the keystone of the life of the modern university since the time of Humboldt (1969, p. 51), although it is a somewhat elusive term that takes its meaning from its context. As late as the turn of the twentieth century, Marginson and Considine (2000, p. 152) stated that no Australian university managed research by explicit direction from above, as such a move would represent a direct challenge to academic freedom. However, this seems to have changed as the OECD (1996) message has been absorbed. While strictly speaking, academics cannot be stopped from researching in areas of interest in their own time, discretionary moneys for travel, research and scholarships may be earmarked for use in designated priority areas or ‘areas of strength’, which have the effect of favouring some scholarship and disfavouring others. Preference for applied research capable of knowledge transfer and commercialization may also operate through appointments and promotions, pay loadings and the bestowal of honours and rewards. Few are likely to be prepared to ‘live on bark’ in order to do their own research, as one British legal scholar I interviewed, suggested. Most are going to capitulate just to survive. However, academic freedom entails more than choice of research subject; it goes to the heart of the conditions under which the research is conducted
28 The politics and culture of university research and shapes the nature of the knowledge produced. As Polanyi made clear long before the advent of the new knowledge economy, freedom is central to the advancement of knowledge, whereas the pursuit of applied knowledge requires subordination (1951, pp. 43–5). That is, certain presuppositions prevail in the case of applied knowledge that cannot be contested. The lack of an independent standpoint has significant implications for the type of applied research currently in vogue and funded by industry end-users. In addition to the need to accede to the demands of sponsors of research, the financial rewards have a propensity to displace or cloak academic and ethical concerns. The depoliticizing effects of the shift to consultancies and research funded by ‘industry partners’ are therefore profound. It is in this way that academic freedom is being insidiously undermined. The relationship between academic researcher and industry partner in research collaborations is reminiscent of that of the client/patron relationship in Ancient Rome. The academic client occupies the status of supplicant, always dependent on the good graces of the patron principal, whose support can be withdrawn at will. Apart from being subject to the whims of the principal in the conduct of the project, there is likely to be a conservative bias in the research in order to minimize any risk associated with it, as noted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) (2005, p. 14). In social science and humanities grants, CAUT has also observed a favouring of technology and communication over social justice and ethical concerns, underscoring the depoliticizing potential of applied research. Generally speaking, industry partners whose business it is to maximize profits have little interest in critique, unless it is directed towards competitors. As their interest is invariably on specific problems, it is technocratic, ‘how to’ knowledge that is valued. As consultancies are no longer treated as inferior to other forms of grant income so far as government policy generally is concerned, the superficial veneer of equal treatment disguises how the production of applied and policy-oriented research contributes to the erasure of critical and theoretical perspectives (Tombs and Whyte 2003, p. 207). The patron/client relationship is obviously in the vanguard in the case of consultancies where the terms of the research and even the desired outcome may be specified by the patron/principal. Instances have been recounted of principals declining to pay researchers because they did not care for the findings (Presdee and Walters 1998; White 2001). The hope that future consultancies may emerge from a particular arrangement encourages an uncritical stance on the part of both researchers and their institutions. A primary, if not exclusive, focus on technocratic legal knowledge effectively presents a scientific veneer, which means that questions are not likely to be asked about the exploitative business practices of a powerful patron corporation, either at home or in the Third World (Thornton 2002). There is a tendency to stifle the prudential and the critical voice generally in case it should offend either present or future corporate funders. The public interest in the research is subtly repressed by the centripetal pull of the market, which also impacts on the academic culture
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more broadly, including what is taught within the disciplines. In law, for example, courses facilitative of the market are currently favoured over social justice, theory and critique (Thornton 2007). While the picture is by no means uniform, humanities and social science scholars have been particularly vulnerable to redundancy because critique, the essence of their work, is no longer perceived to be central to the enterprise university. The fate of the Faculty of Arts at the Queensland University of Technology, which entailed the closure of an entire campus in 2008, is illustrative (JPU 2008). As all research builds creatively on what has gone before, the assertion of ownership over the research by a corporate principal impedes the free flow of information in accordance with the traditional role of the university as custodian of public knowledge within an intellectual commons regime. Influential figures, such as Joseph Stiglitz, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, would argue that the exercise of commercialization is misconceived as knowledge is necessarily a public good, its two critical properties being non-rivalrous consumption and non-excludability. The proprietor acquires the right to exclude others to knowledge with the aid of legal protections, such as patents. This is the way proprietary interests operate in respect of land, for example. However, interests in knowledge do not work the same way. No one can establish a good root of title through which exclusive possession has been maintained historically because basic ideas on which the knowledge depends, such as mathematical theorems, are not patentable (Stiglitz 1999). Unpacking the cumulative nature of knowledge in this way makes clear that the imperative in favour of privatization is misconceived. The new money-generating role of the university – requiring it either to emulate private for-profit corporations itself or to transfer the fruits of research to such a corporation – collides head-on with the university’s good citizen role as the guardian of public knowledge and the facilitator of its free pursuit. The privatizing imperative of academic capitalism can have the effect of impeding creativity, as well as the free flow of knowledge (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, p. 103). There is an aporia, or blocked passage, between academic capitalism and academic freedom, for they do not appear to be reconcilable. Public good knowledge has not disappeared altogether but, as Slaughter and Rhodes point out, it is being displaced, if not replaced, by academic capitalism (2004, p. 305). The homologous relationship between universities and private corporations that is being fostered by technology transfer is strengthened by ancillary technologies such as ‘trustee interlocks’ (Pusser et al. 2006). This is a phenomenon whereby members of the governing board of a university simultaneously occupy a position on the board of a for-profit corporation. Interlocking appointments allow the rapid communication of information about research practices and market activity from one sector to another. It is a governance issue that has had little scrutiny, perhaps reflecting the relative novelty of moves to corporatize public universities. The entrepreneurial imperative has encouraged universities to appoint more business people and
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company directors to their governing bodies in the belief that this will automatically give them an edge in the market. The phenomenon can only eviscerate the independence of research further and blur the public/private divide. Academic freedom has been deleteriously affected by terror censorship since 9/11 (Gerstmann and Streb 2006), but it is my contention that such an extreme example of intervention deflects attention away from the way repression is insidiously normalized as a result of the commodification and privatization of research. The seeds of un-freedom, I would suggest, inhere within the new knowledge economy, for any critique that takes place is circumscribed by the constraints of market orthodoxy. In this way, the vital roles of academic as public intellectual and university as critic and conscience of society are necessarily inhibited through the new marketized research norms. The repressive tendency is subtle and insidious. It is effected through practices of governmentality that are shaped by prevailing state and university research priorities within a climate of neoconservatism. The concept of governmentality includes the new technologies of management that take myriad forms and occupy multiple sites for the purpose of political control (Foucault 1991). This broad understanding of governmentality also includes governance of the self (Rose 1996): ‘Autonomous individuals confront and develop themselves under conditions of risk, amidst deregulated, liberalized social arrangements and freed from the constraints of tradition’ (Baker and Brown 2007, p. 141). While the freedom of the individual is all important under neo-liberalism, as it was with classical liberalism, the neo-liberal subject is not free in the same way. The focus is on freedom in the market, requiring the subject to be an ‘enterprising and competitive entrepreneur’ (Olssen and Peters 2005, p. 315). In other words, the notion of freedom is constrained by the presuppositions of the market. As academic subjects are caught by the viscous threads of governmentality, they are left with no autonomous space within which to act and resist effectively: Under liberal governmentality, the ‘professions’ constituted a mode of institutional organization characterized by a principle of autonomy which characterized a form of power based on ‘delegation’ (i.e., delegated authority) and underpinned by relation of trust. Under neoliberal governmentality, principal-agent line management chains replace delegated power with hierarchical forms of authoratively [sic] structured relation, which erode, and seek to prohibit, an autonomous space from emerging. (Olssen and Peters 2005, p. 324) The unremitting focus on competition in order to augment productivity, profits and control has very effectively muted the plea for academic freedom, an idea that now seems to have as much traction as the Newmanite ideal of pursuing knowledge for its own sake.
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Conclusion The research revolution is contributing to the disintegration and reorganization of knowledge in modern society (Gibbons et al. 1994). The new knowledge economy has strengthened the imperative to privatize the fruits of research and eviscerate the public good associated with the idea of the university. As depoliticized, dehumanized and applied knowledge is favoured by the new knowledge economy, universities everywhere are in danger of resembling the functionalist institutions that Karl Jaspers feared would emerge in post-World War I Germany: Either we will succeed in preserving the German university through a rebirth of its idea in the decision to create a new organizational form, or the university will end up in the functionalism of giant institutions for the training and development of specialized scientific and technical expertise. ( Jaspers, quoted in Habermas 1989, p. 100) The assumption that technological innovation will progress ever forward as ongoing evidence of liberal prosperity untouched by social or ethical concerns could lead us down the path of ‘creative destruction’ (Bullen et al. 2006). The technocratic and applied approach allows little space for critique and would prefer to slough off critique altogether. It is no surprise that the humanities, the primary locus of reflexivity, theorization and critique, are under siege, as is the humanistic dimension of disciplines such as law. It would appear that the public university is indeed fast becoming a historical curiosity, as noted above by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR 2008). While Bok (2003, p. 204) asserts that traditional academic norms have not been eroded completely in favour of making money, this may be a question of standpoint. An elite US Ivy League university from whence he hails (Harvard), with substantial positional goods and an annual budget that exceeds that of many nation states may be quite differently situated from a public university struggling to survive. The irony is that well-endowed private institutions may end up being custodians of the remnants of the public good, while impoverished public universities are compelled to become facilitators of private wealth creation to survive. As Olssen and Peters predict, the struggle over the public means of knowledge production is likely to be a significant feature of the forthcoming ‘education wars’ (2005, p. 340).
Acknowledgement Thanks to Dr Trish Luker for research assistance.
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References Arimoto, A. (2005) Globalization, academic productivity and higher education, in A. Arimoto, F. Huang and K. Yokoyama (eds) Globalization and Higher Education (pp.1–21). Hiroshima: Research Institute for Higher Education. Baker, S. and Brown, B. (2007) Rethinking Universities: The Social Functions of Higher Education. London: Continuum. Baker, T. and Simon, J. (2002) Embracing risk, in T. Baker and J. Simon (eds) Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (pp.1–25). London: University of Chicago Press. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter. London: Sage. Blackmore, J. (2003) Tracking the nomadic life of the educational researcher: what future for feminist public intellectuals and the performative university? The Australian Educational Researcher, 30: 1–24. Bok, D. (2003) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Brennan, A. and Malpas, J. (2008) Borderless art made tongue-tied by authority, The Australian: Higher Education, 2 July, p. 23. Bullen, E., Fahey. J. and Kenway, J. (2006) The knowledge economy and innovation: certain uncertainty and the risk economy, Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27: 53–68. Bullen, E., Robb, S. and Kenway, J. (2004) ‘Creating destruction’: knowledge economy policy and the future of the arts and humanities in the academy, Journal of Education Policy, 19: 3–22. Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) (2005) Alternative Fifth Year Review of Canada Research Chairs Program. Ottawa: CAUT. Connell, H. (ed.) (2004) University Research Management: Meeting the Institutional Challenge. Paris: OECD. Cowan, M. (ed.) (1963) Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. DEEWR (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, Australian Government) (2008) Review of Australian Higher Education: Discussion Paper. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (pp. 87–104). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gaita, R. (2004) Breach of trust: truth, morality and politics, Quarterly Essay, 16: 1–68. Garrick, J. and Clegg, S. (2000) Organizational Gothic: transfusing vitality and transforming the corporate body through work-based learning, in C. Symes and J. McIntyre (eds) Working Knowledge: The New Vocationalism and Higher Education (pp. 153–71). Philadelphia: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press. Gerstmann, E. and Streb, M. J. (eds) (2006) Academic Freedom at the Dawn of a New Century: How Terrorism, Governments, and Culture Wars Impact Free Speech. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P. and Trow, M. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Giroux, H. A. (2002) Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher
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education: the university as a democratic public sphere, Harvard Educational Review, 72: 425–64. Habermas, J. (1989) The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans., ed. S. W. Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harris, S. (2008) Internationalising the university, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40: 346–57. Hazelkorn, E. (2005) University Research Management: Developing Research in New Institutions. Paris: OECD. Huang, F. (2005) Globalization and changes in Chinese higher education, in A. Arimoto, F. Huang and K. Yokoyama (eds) Globalization and Higher Education (pp. 67–76). Hiroshima: Research Institute for Higher Education. Humboldt, W. von (1969) The Limits of State Action, ed., trans. J. W. Burrow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jaspers, K. (1960) The Idea of the University, ed. K. Deutsch, trans. H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. London: Peter Owen. JPU (2008) Journal for the Public University, Special Issue, 5. Retrieved 31 March 2009 from: http://www.publicuni.org/jrnl/home.html Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Lyotard, J- F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marginson, S. (2007) Global position and position taking: the case of Australia, Journal of Studies in International Education, 11: 5–32. Marginson, S. and Considine, M. (2000) The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marginson, S. and van der Wende, M. (2007) Globalisation and Higher Education. Paris: OECD. Newman, J. H. ([1852] 1976) The Idea of a University, (ed. I. T. Ker). Oxford: Clarendon. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) (1996) The Knowledge-Based Economy. Paris: OECD. Olssen, M. and Peters, M. A. (2005) Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: from the free market to knowledge capitalism, Journal of Education Policy, 20(3): 313–45. O’Neill, O. (2002) A Question of Trust. BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polanyi, K. (1951) The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders. London: Routledge. Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Presdee, M. and Walters, R. (1998) The perils and politics of criminological research and the threat to academic freedom, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 10: 156–67. Pusser, B., Slaughter, S. and Thomas, S. L. (2006) Playing the board game: an empirical analysis of university trustee and corporate board interlocks, Journal of Higher Education, 77: 747–75. Reichman, J. H. and Dreyfus, R. C. (2007) Harmonization without consensus: critical reflections on drafting a substantive patent law treaty, Duke Law Journal, 57: 85–130. Rock, A. (2002) Press Release, Canadian Minister of Industry. Toronto, 19 November. Rose, N. (1996) Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Rose, N. (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. (1999) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. London: W. W. Norton. Shore, C., and Wright, S. (1999) Audit culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in British higher education, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5: 557–75. Slaughter, S. and Leslie, L. L. (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. and Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stiglitz, J. E. (1999) Knowledge as a global public good. Retrieved 16 September 2008 from: http://www.worldbank.org/knowledge/chiefecon/articles/undpk2/ Thornton, M. (2002) Inhabiting a Political Economy of Uncertainty: Academic Life in the 21st Century, Occasional Paper No. 2. Melbourne: Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Thornton, M. (2007) The law school, the market and the new knowledge economy, Legal Education Review, 17: 1–26. Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (eds) (2003) Unmasking the Crimes of the Powerful: Scrutinizing States and Corporations. New York: Peter Long. White, R. (2001) Criminology for sale: institutional change and intellectual field, Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 13: 127–42.
2 Research quality assessment: objectives, approaches, responses and consequences Ian McNay
Introduction This chapter attempts two main things. First, it reviews approaches to research quality assessment (RQA) in a range of countries around the world. The diversity that is evident leads to a view that there is a lack of common consensus about the objectives of such assessment. There is also disagreement about the best way to achieve such objectives. The dissonance between means and ends contributes to policies based on trial and error, with constant tinkering, or to a garbage can model (Cohen et al. 1972) where pressure groups push their ‘pet’ solution in a fluid decision-making context. Second, there is consideration of some of the consequences of research quality assessment. Some consequences at system level may have been secondary objectives, sometimes covert or even in the political subconscious. Some may have been unintended, certainly unforeseen. Some are the opposite of overtly stated objectives. At the next level, institutional managers seek strategies in a turbulent context, where the lack of fit may be between institutional priorities and researcher preferences, where the management culture may be inappropriate (another ends/means issue) and where academics seek adaptive strategies to optimize professional choice preferences.
‘More than one way to skin a cat’ This section uses examples from around the world to illustrate different answers to key questions about a process of research quality assessment. It is clear that the dominant approach to research assessment is still at the stage of proposals – to research councils or other sponsors – or as part of an overall institutional audit, with research as one element, developed as part of the quality assurance movement within the concept of the evaluative state (Neave 1998). Many such audits concentrate on processes for self-management within nominally autonomous institutions, with varying
36 The politics and culture of university research degrees of ‘lightness of touch’ in such accountability frameworks. However, the focus here is on arrangements for assessment of products, i.e. the output of research. This may involve some issues related to both proposals – did the output meet the declared intentions? – and to process – was it as proposed and conducted rigorously? What has developed in some countries over the past 20 years is an exercise across the system of higher education and research to assess research quality as a discrete function of the publicly funded scientific community. Such exercises are the main concern here. I seek to illuminate four issues: 1 2 3 4
What purposes does research quality assessment serve? What is the focus for evidence, evaluation, reporting, funding? What processes are involved? What grading categories are applied, using what criteria and what evidence?
Purposes/objectives At a workshop at the 2008 INORMS Conference (the international organization for research managers), delegates identified which of the 23 objectives in Box 2.1 were formal, publicly stated objectives of the approach to research assessment in their country. The 19 respondents from the UK included 13 items in their listings. Individual respondents listed from one to six responses. Items receiving most votes were: 12 to ‘inform funding’ (18 votes) 16 to invest in the ‘best’ in a context of world class competitiveness (14 votes) 13 to ensure ‘value for money’ (11 votes) 2 to enhance quality (8 votes) Seven Australian respondents included 14 items. Their top four were: 22 to promote research impact and, thereby, improvement in policy, practice and people’s lives (4 votes) 2 to enhance quality (4 votes) 10 to monitor ‘fit’ with (diverse?) institutional missions and strategies (3 votes) 13 to ensure ‘value for money’ (3 votes) Item 9 (to promote diversity of activity) is part of policy in Hong Kong, item 7 (to influence the research agenda) is included in the Performance-Based Research Funding (PBRF) system in New Zealand, and item 18 (context for students) is included in the criteria in the ratings of research doctorate programmes in the USA. None of those items featured in the UK or Australian returns. Contract compliance (item 8) is a feature of institution-
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Box 2.1 Research quality assessment: possible purposes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
to assure an acceptable threshold of activity and quality to enhance quality to improve productivity to build capacity to weed out underperforming staff to improve the management of research to influence the research agenda to monitor contract compliance to promote diversity of activity to monitor ‘fit’ with (diverse?) institutional missions and strategies to encourage alignment with national strategic priorities to ‘inform funding’ to ensure ‘value for money’ to justify bids for more government money to identify areas for strategic investment to invest in the ‘best’ (institutions, departments, centres) in a context of world class competitiveness 17 to ‘prevent undue concentration of funding’ 18 to help ensure a ‘well-found’ context for students with a critical mass of activity 19 to encourage particular approaches to research – e.g. teamwork, applied research 20 to arrive at ratings and rankings to inform potential clients 21 to encourage innovation, invention 22 to promote research impact and, thereby, improvement in policy, practice and people’s lives 23 to encourage links between research and • teaching • enterprise • users of research • knowledge transfer • economic development • regional regeneration • international competitiveness
state audit and accountability processes in many countries in continental Europe. Given the top ranked item for the UK, it is worth noting that some systems with a research quality assessment exercise, e.g. Hong Kong and the Netherlands, specifically detach assessment from funding. Assessment does not influence funding decisions. No great claims are made on the basis of this small sample, but, for the UK, the range of views suggests that more is attributed to arrangements for
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research assessment than may be formally claimed. A bigger sample might demonstrate more rigorously that there is fuzziness in understanding the purposes of the UK exercise. The differences from Australia in the top three items suggest a different value base for the perceived objectives. The UK priorities are about money, the Australian ones about quality. The INORMS participants were also asked to identify secondary, unstated, objectives, perhaps in the political subconscious: what Boston (2006, p. 26) in New Zealand, calls the ‘informal or shadow logics . . . of the key advocates’. Seven responses listed a total of 37 items, covering 16 of the above, with item 5 receiving 5 votes and others (11, 18, 22) being identified in addition to those seen as formally, overtly stated. One person recorded strong, dismissive negatives for items 17 and 22. Those, along with 8, 9 and 10, were the items not ticked at any stage for the UK. One further suggested objective was ‘to raise the image of research among the public’: an overtly stated objective in New Zealand. Finally, the session explored briefly how far research quality assessment encouraged links between research and other strategic activity – teaching, enterprise, users, knowledge transfer, economic development, regional regeneration, international competitiveness. None of those were seen as linked to research by more than three people in a sample of 60. Even where staff worked in a unit with a dual title, such as ‘research and enterprise’, the links were not seen as strategically strong, and policy was not integrated. In relation to teaching, this confirms findings from informal questioning of staff from UK institutions claiming to offer ‘research-led’ teaching. In some countries, there are projects to promote such linkages, separate from ‘core’ university research activity. In the USA, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes for Health require funding bids to demonstrate that they promote teaching, training and learning, and broaden the participation of under-represented groups (Colwell 1999). What emerges from this small, informal survey supports the burgeoning literature on research quality assessment in suggesting that politicians are trying to find a simple solution to a complex issue. University research has multiple possible objectives, and any exercise attempting to set a narrow framework for assessment risks promoting conformity to an isomorphic pattern of activity (Horta et al. 2008). The changes that have been seen in the UK and Australia suggest that governments have no coherent, consistent view of what they want from research and so tinker with the objectives set, the criteria applied, and the processes operated for assessing it.
Focus of assessment The structural level at which evaluation is focused differs in different contexts/countries. In the UK, the starting point is the unit of output – publication, patent, artefact. Those are linked to ‘research-active’ individuals within ‘Units of Assessment’. Those units are usually aligned with academic
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departments, which are organized to deliver teaching. Research is often done in teams that cross those structural boundaries, but members of such interdisciplinary teams disaggregate to their parent discipline and so are judged outside the context in which they do their research. Funding is then allocated to institutional level and internal distribution may not match external allocation. In Spain and Mexico, individuals submit a research portfolio to a national committee for designation as ‘distinguished professors’. In Spain, each award gains a small salary increment, but no extra allocation is made to the institution or the host department. In Mexico, individuals are graded, with differential rewards paid under a national system of researchers (SNI). In South Africa, individuals are graded and, though a formal link to funding was removed some years ago, the profile may influence institutional funding decisions, even though submission of a portfolio is voluntary. In New Zealand, for the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF), all academic staff receive a personal grade, now published only at the aggregated level of departmental and institutional profiles, which are used for funding purposes. In The Netherlands, research teams are assessed in four areas. Officially, results should not be used for ranking or ‘league tables’ but web pages, such as Wageningen for Chemistry, do record their score (perhaps because it was 20/20!). Feedback reports, with scores, are available on the internet (www.qanu.nl), and the emphasis is on formative assessment to assist future development, with research organizations outside the higher education system also being covered. South Korea focuses on the academic unit. In Hong Kong, where the process also starts with individual output, the unit of assessment is the cost centre, even though there is no link to funding; the only person informed of scores and feedback is the vice-chancellor. That is also a feature in Pakistan where rankings against criteria are fed back to encourage development though competitive benchmarking. Countries as different as China, Norway and Ireland focus on the institutional level. In many continental European countries there are contract agreements between state agencies and institutions, linked to funding and often used as levers to align research activity closer to national strategic priorities. National and international evaluations are conducted by the OECD.
Grading statements Mexico has the simplest set of rankings, summarized in Auf der Hyde and Mouton (2007), drawing on Arenas, Valles and Arenas (2000): The first level includes researchers with doctorates who have already demonstrated their productivity and are involved in innovative, high quality research projects. The second level is made up of researchers who have consistently carried out research recognised for its originality,
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whether as an individual or as part of a group. Finally, the third level is reserved for researchers who have made important contributions to the fields of science or technology, the value of which has been recognised by the national and international academic community, and who have also done outstanding work as educators at the highest level. (Auf der Hyde and Mouton 2007, p. 68, italics added: note the dual requirement for research and teaching quality) In 2004, 971 (11.3 per cent) had the highest rating, out of 9,028 members of the SNI. The Mexican system was introduced in 1984, the earliest of the systems covered here, to help counter ‘brain drain’ to other countries or to posts outside higher education. Its objectives can be summarized as ‘reward and retention’, by allocating esteem and resources to members of the national system of researchers (SNI). In 2006, in South Africa, of the three ‘basic grades’, 60 researchers (3.6 per cent) rated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) were in category A. A total of 1668 people, not just from universities, but also from other state-funded research institutions had a positive rating (Drennan 2008), though Auf der Hyde and Mouton (2007, p. 50) give figures suggesting that some 392 let their rating lapse between 2003 and 2007. Between 1990 and 2005, the average per capita article count of rated researchers declined by between 7 per cent and 12 per cent (Auf der Hyde and Mouton 2007, p. 51, Table 6). Given that the link to funding stopped in 2000, that suggests that esteem alone is not enough to justify the effort to cope with the bureaucracy of the system. Financial reward is also needed. In New Zealand, individuals submit an evidence portfolio (EP) including publications, other contributions to a research culture, and indicators of esteem. The funding formula gives those portfolios a 60 per cent weighting, with research degree completions weighted at 25 per cent and external research income at 15 per cent. In 2006, of 8,671 PBRF eligible staff (headcount) 630 (7.27 per cent) were assigned an A (equivalent to ‘world class’) for their portfolios. When aggregated to institutional level, the range of those in universities awarded at least a B was from 50.4 per cent to 15.8 per cent, with an average of 42.3 per cent (TEC 2007). That can be set alongside the percentage of units in the UK getting a 5 or 5* grade, which moved from 20 per cent in 1996 to 39 per cent in 2001 of those making a submission; the percentage of individuals entered who worked in units with those top grades went from 31 per cent to 55 per cent (RAE 2001). UK grade statements and indicators were vague and imprecise, or, if overtly clear and uncompromising, flexibly applied (McNay 2003, 2007). That vagueness also applies to the grades and definitions that operated for 2008 in the UK. Units now get a quality profile, collating profiles on research output, research environment and esteem indicators. Panels could give a different weighting to these three elements in arriving at an overall profile: ‘output’ had to have a minimum weighting of 50 per cent; ‘environment’ and ‘esteem’ a minimum of 5 per cent each. Those ‘sub-profiles’ were
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released only to individual institutions. All three elements are given a profile with a balance of ratings, from 4* to unclassified. There are three reference points for judgement – originality, significance and rigour – for which quality is deemed ‘world leading’, ‘internationally excellent’, ‘recognised internationally’ or ‘recognised nationally’. ‘World leading’ is seen officially as an ‘absolute standard’ (RAE 2005) but McNay (2007) and Johnston (2008) have analysed panel statements to show that a variety of interpretations is applied to it, and to the other descriptors, many of them normative. Johnston sees ‘world-leading’ as revolutionary science, promoting a paradigm shift, not highly competent work within existing paradigms. The short-lived proposals in Australia used similar categories and descriptors to the UK guidelines and had an additional, separate, 5-point rating for impact beyond the academic world, relating to social, economic, environmental and/or cultural benefit. That framework collapsed with the change of government in 2008. The New Zealand PBRF also uses ‘world class’ as its top grade. There has been, there, a fuller, open, more thoughtful reflection on the exercise than in other countries. The guidance on ‘world-class’ merits attention. For a top score of 7, the evidence portfolio: would be expected to demonstrate leadership and accomplishment in research exemplified by a platform of world-class research that includes highly original work that ranks with the best of its kind. In doing so, the EP would likely be characterised by, for example, outputs that represent intellectual or creative advances, or contributions to the formation of new paradigms, or generation of novel conceptual or theoretical analysis and/or theories or important new findings with wider implications. In doing so, it could indicate research that is exemplary in its field and/or at the leading edge and/or highly innovative. It would be expected to demonstrate intellectual rigour, imaginative insight or methodological skill or to form a primary point of reference to be disseminated widely . . . The research outputs would be likely to result in substantial impact . . . product development, uptake and dissemination; or significant changes in professional, policy, organizational, artistic, or research practices. (TEC, 2005, Chapter 3. Note that there were separate criteria for Ma¯ ori related work) Other systems avoid the use of ‘world class’. Quality Assurance Netherlands Universities (QANU) an independent foundation uses a 5 point scale, previously balanced across excellent, good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory and poor. Now there are four positives and only one ‘fail’ category. ‘Excellent’ work is ‘at the forefront internationally’, likely to have ‘an important and substantial impact in the field’; ‘very good’ work is ‘internationally competitive’ making a ‘significant contribution’, at the forefront nationally; ‘good’ work is ‘competitive at the national level’ and likely to make a ‘valuable contribution in the international field’. ‘Satisfactory’ work is ‘solid but not
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exciting’. Even though the focus of assessment is at programme level, the institutional context is also rated, with institutions moving from ‘considered an international leader’, through ‘international player, national leader’ to ‘internationally visible, national player’. Programmes are assessed against four criteria: quality, productivity, relevance and vitality. That last item is sometimes labelled ‘prospects’ since the emphasis is on formative development. The panel not only receives paperwork, including a self-assessment, and ‘products/outputs’, but visits the institution (more than universities are covered) and engages with staff, as part of a rolling programme, unlike big periodic exercises elsewhere. Since the same foundation assesses teaching quality, there may at times be a linked exercise (www.qanu.nl). That is also true in Hong Kong, which uses all four Carnegie scholarships (Boyer 1990) as an assessment framework: discovery, integration, application, and teaching/transmission/dissemination. This attempts to avoid imbalance towards research at the expense of teaching. Indeed, research ‘should support and illuminate teaching and learning’ (HKUGC 2006). Work is also assessed in the context of the institutional mission, to encourage institutional role differentiation. Collaboration among institutions was also an explicit assessment criterion in 2006. There is no grading beyond a binary un/satisfactory, with the quality criterion for activity and output being ‘a level of excellence appropriate to the discipline in Hong Kong and showing evidence of international excellence’. Such simplicity is possible because the UGC believes that a research assessment exercise cannot discriminate at the top end (compare the clustering in the UK in categories 5 and 5*). A separate competitive grant scheme funds bids to satisfy those claiming excellence. Results are not released, since: ‘institutions have different roles, disciplines and histories; the purpose of the exercise is neither to identify and compare the number of “star” researchers, nor to measure the research output with a view to giving a grading to institutions for research performance’ (HKUGC 2006, p. 19).
Processes and data It is worth repeating that systematic assessment, conducted at national level, is not the norm. Across major world regions research quality assessment is done at the stage of considering bids of various kinds, framed by contracts, or is done internally by institutions in relation to strategic decisions and staff promotions (Braddock and Neave 2002; UNESCO 2006), evaluated by institutional audit. Campbell (2003) sees that model being adopted increasingly, allowing research to be tied to national development priorities as part of a culture of contract compliance in systems of higher education governance. There are major disagreements, even disputes, about methods of decisionmaking and data collection to inform the decisions. In the USA, Michelson (2006, p. 558) sees a trend towards standardization and harmonization of methodologies across agencies, and an increasing use of quantitative data,
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particularly bibliometrics, but paired with a ‘renewed focus on utilizing qualitative indicators . . . to create more appropriate hybrid methodologies that can capture a wider range of variables related to a programme’s performance’. Most approaches do use such a hybrid methodology. A report for HEFCE on international practices by von Tunzelmann and Kraemer Mbula (2003) described:
• a shift to formative evaluation linked to prospective funding; • an increased use of international comparators – benchmarking exercises or relative citation levels;
• greater emphasis on institutional self-evaluation. Since the publication of their report, there has been a surge of interest in quantitative performance indicators (PIs) with several researchers demonstrating strong correlations between, for example, citation levels and research assessment exercise ratings (Charlton and Andras 2007). Only Flanders currently uses bibliometrics as a major assessment tool, and then only for a narrow range of disciplines, but the UK is currently investing many resources in developing repositories to inform such an approach. The following summary of strengths and weakness draws on work by the OECD (2004), the Australian Expert Advisory Group (2005), Scott (2007), Sastry and Bekhradnia (2006a, 2006b) and my previous work (McNay 2003, 2007). There is a useful set of articles in a special issue of Science and Public Policy exploring these issues more fully (Donovan 2007). Strengths of metrics/performance indicators include:
• incentives to productivity, staff recruitment and retention, degree com• • • • •
pletions, income generation; clear criteria for reward systems; easy collection of data; lower costs; transparent formulae are easily understood; encouragement to enterprising staff pursuing useful knowledge.
Weaknesses cover:
• bias in the choice of metrics and weighting; • use of an income metric passes control to sponsors/clients with a different value base and an interest in the ‘right’ outcomes;
• competitive bidding is inefficient, reduces co-operation and takes time away from teaching and service functions;
• discrimination against newer staff and those taking career breaks; • citations are not yet reliable, and can be manipulated; • decision processes by funders, journal editors and others that lead to metrics are less open/transparent. To balance this, advantages claimed for expert/peer review include the following:
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• direct engagement with research output allows for formative feedback and easier acceptance of decisions by the academic community;
• the process can be related to different disciplines or professional fields with differing expectations and interpretations;
• a more holistic judgement can be made by a panel with international membership, using information on context and other factors – personal and institutional; • quantitative data are not excluded. Disadvantages of expert/peer review may be:
• high cost through heavy use of staff; • the collective prejudice of panel members, who have established the
• • • •
canon, which may privilege work in traditional fields and frameworks, and undervalue challenging approaches and findings, newer researchers, women and those from non-traditional institutions; inconsistency across panels and over time; reinforcement of decisions taken by the same established elite, discounting end-users of research and work in professional or ‘popular’ journals, in favour of a perspective from a closed academic community; obscure criteria, an opaque process and a fear of hidden agendas; assessors are not trained – they are expected to recognize quality when they see it (Johnston 2008).
Outcomes and responses The different approaches covered above will have different consequences and provoke different responses in different countries, though some issues cross boundaries.
Institutional management The main gain seems to have been to managers. Institutional responses to the UK RAE have centred on more management of research activity (McNay 1997). How far that was better management was less clear. What the results provided was leverage for action, and an external justification for internal decisions. The South African study (Auf der Hyde and Mouton 2007) found that use of the rating system varied but was used by most universities to inform/influence:
• • • • •
strategic goal setting and planning; research management – structures and sponsorship; staff recruitment and selection, including headhunting of targeted staff; resource allocation, salaries/bonuses and prizes/awards; marketing and promotion.
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The institutional gain did not cascade down: ‘researchers did not perceive significant benefits from being rated’ (Auf der Hyde and Mouton 2007, p. 42). Among staff surveyed, it was the highly rated and newer researchers who indicated the most positive benefits. Some 58 per cent indicated positive impact on career advancement, but only 16 per cent said there were positive gains in funding. Three-quarters saw no benefits in terms of access to the wider research community, either nationally or internationally, and under half claimed an improved profile in the broader community. One UK vice-chancellor (Thomas 2007) is highly critical of university leadership and management in the context of the RAE. Their ‘adaptive behaviour’ is labelled ‘irrational’ (2007, p. 43) and ‘perverse’, with ‘no learning curve’ (2007, p. 44). They adopt strategies of investing for the RAE, when: even a superficial analysis shows such investment incapable of producing an economically sustainable return . . . the strategy leading up to the RAE leaves universities with large recurrent costs, particularly in salaries . . . A sort of boom and bust cycle occurs with major investment before the RAE and significant retrenchment afterwards because the outcome has not delivered the expected increase in income. (Thomas 2007, p. 44) Thomas’s conclusion is that: Evidence of a causal relationship between the RAE audit process and improvement in research quality and leadership and management cannot be proved and it is logical to suppose that these improvements have occurred as a result of managerial necessity and the increasing selectivity of research funding. On the other hand there is evidence that the current RAE . . . precipitates behaviours which can be damaging to universities and their staff. (Thomas 2007, p. 46)
Productivity There are other perversities and paradoxes. Unlike teaching, where funding is linked to student numbers, with the unit of resource (i.e. government funding per full-time equivalent student) unchanging, in the UK, there is now no productivity requirement applied to increases in research funding. Only four outputs are required as evidence of quality. Moore, Newman, Sloane and Steely (2002) suggest the early exercises, which counted publications, promoted a ‘productivity shock’. The response was not to do more research but to seek higher rated outlets; not more productivity, but different publishing strategies. The South African review (Auf der Hyde and Mouton 2007) concluded that productivity increased among lower rated staff, but the average output per person declined steadily. In Australia, where
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research funding has a stronger link to externally generated funds, to publications count and to research student success, the picture is different. Taylor (2001) reported that her sample had changed their approach to research in favour of more publications and/or external grant applications.
Quality constraint There may have been a trade-off with quality: one of Taylor’s interviewees commented on ‘an industry of unnecessary journals’; another now spent ‘more time on relatively superficial publications’ (Taylor 2001, p. 52). Student work was now on ‘easier projects . . . (with) less scope for lateral thinking . . . which can be managed in the time’ (2001, p. 53). Her conclusion was that ‘quality is forgotten as participants busy themselves with maximising their performance on the indicators’ (2001, p. 57). Laudel (2006, p. 502) confirms her findings for physicists in both Australia and Germany: competitive funding promotes ‘low risk, mainstream, “cheap”, applied, inflexible research’, and scientists’ adaptive behaviours restrain quality and innovation. Glaser and Laudel (2005) produced similar findings, summarized as ‘cognitive immobility’, from work on history, biochemistry and geology in Australia. They also found that the influence of research quality assessment, which generated relatively little income, was lower than institutional policies on, for example, tenure and promotion.
Identity and enterprise The concern over negative impacts on quality came through a survey by McNay (2008) with 290 responses from UK academics. Some 52 per cent agreed, and only 8 per cent disagreed that in research, ‘quality assurance processes have encouraged low risk conformity at the expense of innovation, independence and “difference” ’; 67.5 per cent agreed (9 per cent dissenting) that ‘research integrity has been compromised by a mix of pressures to publish, perhaps prematurely, commercial pressures and sponsors’ expectations in commissioned research’. There is a long record of research in the UK with similar findings on economics (Harley and Lee 1997; Harley 2000), accounting (Brinn et al. 2001), and more generally, and recently, by Lucas (2006). Henkel (1999, 2005) in the UK and Middleton (2006) in New Zealand both researched academic identities and the effect on academic professionals from the expectations created by the pressure to research and to publish and carry increased service roles. Work with a small sample of social scientists (McNay 2007) suggested that the research pressures were felt most strongly by those in departments judged to be in the middle, i.e. to have achieved a 3a/b and 4 who feel pressure to move up to a 5 or 5* and not to go down to a 1 or a 2. Leading researchers were confident enough to pursue their own agendas. Those
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without funding, and so deemed of low status, were using their own resources to produce ‘free’ output, and their managers were happy with the costbenefit analysis. Harman (2005) suggests that social science researchers had similarly adapted to the market-facing conditions in Australia and negotiated degrees of autonomy. In Sweden, Braunerhjelm (2007) even goes so far as to suggest that researchers are entrepreneurial, but are held back by their university’s organizational culture. Nevertheless, the authors cited above illustrate moves to favour research over teaching, to reduce volunteer service work as ‘academic citizens’ (committee membership, refereeing, book reviews) and to be more strategic about where they focus their research and publishing efforts. A new identity, or set of identities, for academic staff may be emerging as academics, who, after all, are intelligent, and have strong survival instincts, adapt to the changing conditions in the turbulent world of massified higher education (Lucas 2007). What is clear is that control of the research agenda has shifted away from the individual doing the research.
The knowledge agenda Before leaving the issue of effectiveness, it is worth noting other effects on the content of research and the nature of preferred knowledge. Despite the emergence of Mode 2 concepts of knowledge creation (Gibbons et al. 1994) and their demonstrated greater relevance to partnership arrangements and interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving for the real world, there is concern that not all RQA models give full credit to such work. There is a continuing tension between state strategic priorities, market-sensitive (and funded) projects, and academic autonomy and self-determination. Horta et al. (2008) see a trend to isomorphism, where a single, favoured model of excellence provokes conformity to a norm, reducing diversity. They also note that the emphasis on ‘world-class’ or ‘international quality’ with a base in citation has reduced work on issues within countries and, for continental Europe, has reduced publication in native languages in favour of international journals where (American) English is the common tongue. Since language frames thought, that may also lead to a Western colonization of research cultures from different contexts.
Value for money? The concentration of funding on highly rated units or centres can be inefficient. Competition may not enhance quality and productivity across a national system. The transfer market for research stars may have short-term benefit to departments that recruit them, but the salaries offered and other expenses attached to their recruitment and employment have high longterm costs, which do not bring a commensurate return on investment (Thomas 2007). Such stars are often not good at nurturing capacity in
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others – they have ‘won’ in a competitive game, after all – and often may not be good teachers (McNay 1997). In Australia, Grichting (1996) suggests that lower rated institutions give a better ‘bang per buck’. Geuna (1997) and Adams (2005a, 2005b) show that lower rated units, with less state funding, capture proportionately more entrepreneurial income from research users than do those who are ‘well fed’ by both funding and research councils, and for whom there is no need to be a hunter–gatherer. Those well-funded institutions are also geographically concentrated: in some UK regions there is no state funding for research in key areas (Evidence Ltd. 2003). So the link between research, knowledge transfer and regional policy is not evident, despite government rhetoric. The value for money mantra that informed the introduction of the UK RAE seems to have been abandoned. The effect of academic capitalism and competition may also reduce suppliers of research to a few large ‘supermarkets’, driving out the profile of service supplied by the ‘small businesses’. That risks putting power in the hands of a small number of dominant players, as happened with the UK banks in 2008. Government concentrates funding on a few institutions who are essential to policy delivery; power passes to them because of the dependency on them thus created and they can resist pressure from government to behave differently, and even capture the policy agenda. Perhaps it is not quite as bad as in China and South Korea, where concentrated funding on favoured institutions to bring them to competitive ‘world-class’ standard does not seem to have been informed by rigorous quality assurance. Kim (2007) records a ‘Matthew effect’ (to those who have shall be given more), in decisions within an initiative known as Brain Korea 21. Lai and Lo (2007) have concerns in China over the influence of ‘guanxi’ networks, so who you know is the key factor, not what we now know because of your work.
Journal jostling and bibliometrics Brown (2007) reports an interesting adaptive strategy from journal publishing in the light of impact factors and citation rankings. The publisher of the Journal of the American Medical Association, George Lundberg, set out to woo prestige authors to improve his journal’s ranking. He succeeded. However, his view is that the central importance of the ranking to editors has ‘distorted the fundamental character of [medical] journals, forcing them to focus more and more on citations and less and less on readers’. Lundberg also claims that there is little correlation between papers that are cited and those that are considered landmark articles by panels of experts decades later. In the light of that, it is worth noting the warning in a research report on the use of bibliometrics (Evidence Ltd. 2007) before they are seen as the elusive simple solution: There is a risk that any metrics exercise may be intrinsically self-defeating, because it depends on indicators as proxies for the activity of interest.
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Once an indicator is made a target of policy, it starts to lose the information content that originally qualified it to play such a role. There is room for manipulation, there may be emergent behavioural effects and the metrics only capture part of the research process and its benefits It is facile to pretend that all behavioural effects can be anticipated and modelled. The metrics system will be assaulted, from the day it is promulgated, by 50,000 intelligent and motivated individuals deeply suspicious of its outcomes. (Evidence Ltd. 2007, p. 35) Among those effects are:
• volume of output or of citation will lead to spurious publications; • lower-cited domains will try to imitate those with a tradition of greater citation;
• arrangements will be made to cite all output at least once, to remove the stigma of a zero score;
• practitioner journals would suffer; • partitioning credit for joint papers may be a disincentive to the international collaboration that other policies encourage;
• elimination of self-citation risks loss of a continuous narrative and of links between projects.
Conclusion The diversity of systems described above reflects the issues identified by Luukkonen (2003) in evaluating the European Union Framework programme: there are changing political agendas for the function of research and the objectives of assessment are ‘fuzzy’. Thus, the objectives of research quality assessment may also be fuzzy; complex, clouded, confused and poorly communicated. The processes may be unreliable and inconsistent. The data and decision bases to be used are contested. There is conflict and suspicion about the underlying values of the exercises. In the light of the current political pressure for the adoption of quantitative measures seen to be precise, reliable, consistent, even easy to develop and apply, the message is, basically: be careful, be very careful. Going back to the banking analogy, citation inflation can lead to sub-prime-like publication and dubious currency. The privileged, highly funded elite institutions are resisting simple metrics. The result in the UK may be a variant on Michelson’s (2006) hybrid methodologies discussed above. How ‘appropriate’ the approach is can be questioned. That depends on clarity about the purposes of research, and in the UK it is self-referential, unrelated to other functions of higher education or to application and impact on reality. ‘Impact’ measured by bibliometrics is defined within a closed system. The message of the Lisbon Council Report on the European Framework programme may challenge that closed culture: ‘Seeking excellence in research
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should never be allowed to become an excuse for underperformance in the educational tasks. Indeed, in the end, both objectives require the other to be successful’ (Ederer et al. 2008, p. 2). Humboldt would be proud of that enduring concept of a university. Given the diverse purposes of research quality assessment noted early in this chapter, the future may see research located in a wider context. With constraints on public funding, and continuing dominance of funding streams by government and its agencies, the pressure for relevance and applicability may well increase. ‘Impact’ may come to mean more than citation within the academic community. User voices may be listened to more, as is already the case in course development and institutional governance. So, criteria for the assessment of quality may move towards ‘fitness for purpose’, with that purpose defined outside the academic community, not just within it. In the UK that may give more recognition to modern universities in developing alternatives to the dominant elite. The funding allocations that flowed from the 2008 exercise suggest a small, welcome step in that direction. To balance that, curiosity-driven research may come to be subject to a different assessment process, taking evidence from a much longer time period, with a separate funding stream.
References Adams, J. (2005a) Never mind the quality, feel the width, Research Fortnight, 28 September, 18–19. Adams, J. (2005b) Mirror, mirror, on the bench . . ., Research Fortnight, 23 November, 18–19. Arenas, J. L. D., Valles, J. and Arenas, M. (2000) Educational research in Mexico: socio-demographic and visibility issues, Educational Research, 42(1): 85–90. Auf der Hyde, T. and Mouton, J. (2007) Review of the NRF Rating System: Synthesis Report. Cape Town: National Research Foundation. Boston, J. (2006) Rationale for the Performance-Based Research Fund: personal reflections, in L. Bakker, J., L. Boston, L. Campbell and R. Smyth (eds) Evaluating the Performance-Based Research Fund: Framing the Debate (pp. 5–32) Wellington, NZ: Institute of Policy Studies. Boyer, E. L. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. New York: Jossey-Bass/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Braddock, R. and Neave, G. (2002) Research management in higher education: overview and conclusion of a debate, Higher Education Policy, 15: 217–24. Braunerhjelm, P. (2007) Academic entrepreneurship: social norms, university culture and policies, Science and Public Policy, 34(9): 619–31. Brinn, T., Jones, M. J. and Pendlebury, M. (2001) The impact of research assessment exercises on UK accounting and finance faculty, British Accounting Review, 33: 333–55. Brown, H. (2007) How impact factors changed medical publishing – and science, British Medical Journal, 334: 561–64. Campbell, D. F. J. (2003) The evaluation of university research in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, Germany and Austria, in P. Shapira and
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S. Kuhlmann (eds) Learning from Science and Technology Policy Evaluation: Experiences from the United States and Europe (pp. 98–131). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Charlton, B. G. and Andras, P. (2007) Evaluating universities using simple scientometric research-output metrics: total citation counts per university for a retrospective seven-year rolling sample, Science and Public Policy, 34(8): 555–63. Cohen, M. D., March, J. G. and Olsen, P. (1972) A garbage can model of organisational choice, Administrative Science Quarterly, 17: 1–5. Colwell, R. R. (1999) NSF Merit Review. Washington, DC: Office of the Director, National Science Foundation. Donovan, C. (2007) Future pathways for science policy and research assessment: metrics vs peer review, quality vs impact, Science and Public Policy, 34(8): 538–42. Drennan, R. (2008) Researcher development: comparative perspectives on effecting institutional and national culture change, presentation to ARMA/INORMS conference, Liverpool, June. Ederer, P., Schuller, P. and Willms, S. (2008) University Systems Ranking: Citizens and Society in the Age of Knowledge. Brussels: The Lisbon Council. Evidence Ltd. (2003) Funding Research Diversity: the Impact of Further Concentration on University Research Performance and Regional Research Capacity. London: Universities UK. Evidence Ltd. (2007) The Use of Bibliometrics to Measure Research Quality in UK Higher Education Institutions. London: Universities UK. Expert Advisory Group (2005) Research Quality Framework: Assessing the Quality and Impact of Research in Australia: Issues Paper. Canberra, ACT: Department of Education, Science and Training. Geuna, A. (1997) Allocation of funds and research output: the case of UK universities. Revue d’Economie Industrielle, 79(1): 143–62. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S. and Scott, P. (1994) The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamic of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Glaser, J. and Laudel, G. (2005) The impact of evaluations on the content of Australian university research, paper presented at the Australian Sociological Conference, University of Tasmania, December. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: www.tasa.org.au/conferencepapers05/papers%20(pdf)/open_glaser.pdf Grichting, W. L. (1996) Do our research unis give value for money? Campus Review, 6(29): 5. Harley, S. (2000) Accountants divided: research selectivity and academic accounting labour in UK universities, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 11: 187–205. Harley, S. and Lee, F. (1997) Research selectivity, managerialism and the academic labour process: the future of non-mainstream economics in UK universities, Human Relations, 50(11): 1427–60. Harman, G. (2005) Australian social scientists and transition to a more commercial university environment. Higher Education Research and Development, 24(1): 79– 94. Henkel, M. (1999) Academic Identities and Policy Change. London: Jessica Kingsley. Henkel, M. (2005) Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment, Higher Education, 49: 155–76. Hong Kong University Grants Committee (HKUGC) (2006) Research Assessment Exercise 2006. Hong Kong: UGC. Retrieved 26 March 2009 from: www.ugc.edu.hk/ eng/ugc/publication/prog/prog.htm.
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Horta, H., Huisman, J. and Heitor, M. (2008) Does competitive research funding encourage diversity in higher education? Science and Public Policy, 35(3): 146–58. Johnston, R. (2008) On structuring subjective judgements: originality, significance and rigour in RAE 2008, Higher Education Quarterly, 62(1/2): 120–47. Kim, Y. J. (2007) The impacts of evaluation-based funding on academic work: a Korean perspective, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bristol. Lai, M. and Lo, L. N. K. (2007) The changing work lives of academics: the experience of a regional university in the Chinese mainland, Higher Education Policy, 20(2): 385–402. Laudel, G. (2006) The art of getting funded: how scientists adapt to their funding conditions, Science and Public Policy, 33(7): 489–504. Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Lucas, L. (2007) Research and teaching work within university education departments: fragmentation or integration? Journal of Further and Higher Education, 31(1): 17–29. Luukkonen, T. (2003) Challenges for the evaluation of complex programmes, in P. Shapira and S. Kuhlmann (eds) Learning from Science and Technology Policy Evaluation: Experiences from the United States and Europe (pp. 132–53). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. McNay, I. (1997) The Impact of the 1992 RAE on Institutional and Individual Behaviour in English HE: Summary Report and Commentary. Danbury, UK: CHEM/Anglia Polytechnic University. McNay, I. (2003) Assessing the assessment: an analysis of the UK Research Assessment Exercise 2001 and its outcomes, with special reference to research in education, Science and Public Policy, 30(1): 1–8. McNay, I. (2007) Researcher assessment, Researcher autonomy, in M. Tight, C. Kayrooz and G. Åkerlind, (eds) International Perspectives on Higher Education Research, Vol. 4 Autonomy in Social Science Research: The View from the United Kingdom and UK Universities (pp. 183–216). Oxford: Elsevier. McNay, I. (2008) The crisis in higher education: the views of academic professionals on policy, leadership, values and operational practices, Higher Education Review, 40(2): 5–25. Michelson, E. S. (2006) Approaches to research and development performance assessment in the United States: an analysis of recent evaluation trends, Science and Public Policy, 33(8): 546–60. Middleton, S. (2006) Researching identities: impact of the Performance-Based Research Fund on the subject(s) of education, in L. Bakker (ed.) Evaluating the Performance-Based Research Fund: Framing the Debate (pp. 477–500). Wellington, NZ: Institute of Policy Studies. Moore, W. J., Newman, R. J., Sloane, P. J. and Steely, J. D. (2002) Productivity effects of research assessment exercises. Retrieved 20 March 2009 from: www.bus.lsu.edu/economics/papers/pap02_15.pdf Neave, G. (1998) The evaluative state reconsidered, European Journal of Education, 33(3): 265–78. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2004) A PerformanceBased Research Funding for Tertiary Education Institutes: The New Zealand Experience. Paris: OECD. RAE (2001) 2001 Research Assessment Exercise: The Outcome, RAE 4/01. Bristol: HEFCE. RAE (2005) Guidance to Panels. Bristol: HEFCE.
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Sastry, T. and Bekhradnia, B. (2006a). Using Metrics to Allocate Research Funds. Oxford: Higher Education Policy Institute. Retrieved 20 March 2009 from: www.hepi.ac.uk Sastry, T. and Bekhradnia, B. (2006b) Using Metrics to Allocate Research Funds: Response to Governments’ Consultation Proposals. Oxford: Higher Education Policy Institute. Retrieved 20 March 2009 from: www.hepi.ac.uk Scott, A. (2007) Peer review and the relevance of science, Futures, 39(7): 827–45. Taylor, J. (2001) The impact of performance indicators on the work of university academics: evidence from Australian universities, Higher Education Quarterly, 55(1): 42–61. Tertiary Education Commission (2005) Performance-Based Research Fund: Guidelines 2006. Wellington, NZ: TEC. Tertiary Education Commission (2007) PBRF: The 2006 Assessment. Wellington, NZ: TEC. Thomas, E. (2007) National research assessment in higher education, in H. Burgh, A. Fazackerley and J. Balack (eds) Can the Prizes Still Glitter? The Future of British Universities in a Changing World (pp. 39–47). Buckingham: University of Buckingham Press. UNESCO (2006) Final Report: Invitational Workshop on the Comparative Analysis of National Research Systems. Paris: UNESCO. Von Tunzelmann, N. and Kraemer Mbula, E. (2003) Changes in Research Assessment Practices in Other Countries since 1999: Final Report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Bristol: HEFCE.
3 The structure of academic research: what can citation studies tell us? Malcolm Tight
Introduction: the personal and the political I have two ways into this chapter, the personal and the political. First, the personal. Some years ago, I, perhaps somewhat foolishly, conceived of the idea of mapping the state of research in higher education (Tight 2003). This involved analysing hundreds of articles and books published or in print in the year 2000. Once I’d done that, at least to my satisfaction, I re-examined the data I had collected – in particular the 406 articles I had analysed – as an academic scavenger, to see what else might be there of interest. I fastened onto the references, or citations, listed at the end of each article, and – knowing something of citation studies – thought I’d have a look at them (Tight 2006). And then I went further, reasoning that the pattern of citations in articles would tell me something about the pattern of higher education research. Before I realized it – and I suspect that this happens quite often – I found myself re-inventing co-citation analysis (Tight 2008). Second, the political. If you’ve read this book this far, and presumably have some interest in the state of higher education and research, you will probably be aware that citation studies are becoming of increasing importance in the assessment of research nationally and internationally. Thus, in the United Kingdom, we had got accustomed to playing the Research Assessment Exercise game, essentially based on a form of ‘informed prejudice’, since the mid1990s. In its place, we are now promised a more metrics-based system: that is one which makes use of existing bibliometric data, such as citation counts, to judge the worth of research outputs (the ‘lighter touch’ of this process is supposed to save time and money). So my personal interest has been trumped by the political, neatly providing the motivation for writing this chapter. In it, I will start by setting out the ideas behind citation and co-citation analysis. I will then outline my own recent research in the specialized area of higher education research, to demonstrate what citation and co-citation studies can do. Moving outwards from there to explore citation studies more
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generally, I will attempt to show what such studies can tell us about the structure of academic research more generally.
Citation and co-citation analysis Citation (and co-citation) analysis has been described as: A quantitative research approach based on the use of citation indexes. Two measures of scientific activity are used: first, the citation rates of authors, documents, and journals; and, second, the number of co-citations, that is, citation links between authors, documents, and journals. (Desmedt and Valcke 2004, p. 447) Others, coming particularly from an information science background, have extended this work to examine the relationship between citing and the cited work, to carry out content analyses of citation contexts, and to explore the motivations underlying citation (e.g. Hyland 2000; White 2004). The idea underlying the exploration of patterns of co-citation is that, when an academic author writes an article or book on a particular topic, they typically cite other authors who have previously written items relevant to their topic. Where authors are cited in the same article or book, therefore, some linkage is implied, if only in the mind of the person writing the article or book. When co-citation happens relatively frequently in a series of different articles or books, and involves a series of different authors making the same co-citation, then the grounds for suspecting a close linkage – in terms of sharing similar research or methodological interests – between those co-cited strengthen. In some cases, of course, this linkage is made manifest when those co-cited are actually co-authors of one or more items. There are, of course, limitations to citation and co-citation analysis as methodological approaches. Citation analysis is a quantitative technique which is commonly used – by funding bodies and others – to imply judgements of quality. While there is ‘a considerable body of evidence to suggest that citation counts correlate with a variety of subjective and objective performance measures’ (Cronin 1984, p. 27), these correlations are far from perfect. Thus, the most cited authors, titles, journals and publishers may not necessarily be ‘the best’, with citations inflated through self-citation and cronyism, or deflated through jealousy, forgetfulness and ignorance (Warner 2000). Works may be cited for negative as well as positive reasons, and all citations may not be equal, with some referenced just in passing – e.g. to set the policy context – while others are discussed in detail. In co-citation analysis one needs to recognize not only the issue of coauthorship, already mentioned, but also that, if citations may be somewhat arbitrary, then so may co-citations. Some of these problems may be controlled for fairly readily, of course, while, more generally, a critical perspective can be adopted towards the results revealed by citation and co-citation analyses.
56 The politics and culture of university research Triangulation with the results of other kinds of analyses, including qualitative approaches, is also possible and useful. Despite these reservations, however, it is contended that citation, and particularly co-citation, analyses do show much of interest about the patterning of research, because: Citation is central to the social context of persuasion as it can provide justification for arguments and demonstrate the novelty of one’s position. By acknowledging a debt of precedent, a writer is also able to display an allegiance to a particular community or orientation, create a rhetorical gap for his or her research, and establish a credible writer ethos. (Hyland 2000, p. 20)
Citation analysis applied to higher education research My own foray into citation analysis focused on the 10,065 citations included in 406 articles (an average of 24.8 per article) published in 17 specialist higher education journals in the year 2000 (Tight 2006; 2008). The journals were all English language journals published outside of North America. My findings may seem more or less surprising, depending on your familiarity with citation studies. Thus, citation patterns varied a good deal between journals and articles: there were three examples of articles which contained no citations, and also a number that listed more than 100 (and there was one very odd article that cited nothing that had been published within the previous 20 years). Most, 51 per cent, of the cited items had been published within the previous five years, suggesting a short ‘half life’ of currency. Most, 56 per cent, were books or reports, with articles accounting for 37 per cent and other items for the remaining 7 per cent. Over one-third, 38 per cent, of items were cited only once, and most, 52 per cent, no more than twice. Though my sample had been restricted to journals published outside of North America, the most cited author, Burton Clark, was an American, cited 73 times. The next most cited, Paul Ramsden with 69 cites, was of British origin but then working in Australia. Some of the most cited authors attained their eminence partly through extensive self-citation; others because they were co-authors of a popular work. The most cited item, the Dearing Report (NICHE 1997) (a report commissioned by the UK government), was listed in 48 of the articles, though most usually it was cited in passing as evidence of policy interest, and not quoted or examined in any depth. The next two most cited items were books by the most cited authors – Clark’s The Higher Education System and Ramsden’s Learning to Teach in Higher Education – both of which were mentioned in 23 of the articles, but not in the same articles. By examining patterns of co-citation among the 16 most cited authors, it was possible to produce a map indicating their relationships to each other
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(Figure 3.1). This shows two main clusters: one around Clark, focusing on organizational and structural aspects of higher education; the other around Ramsden, focusing on teaching and learning aspects. Around and between them there is evidence of further clusters of research and publication activity, but a more extensive analysis would be needed to map these in detail. Helpfully, the results of these analyses largely confirmed and extended my existing research (Tight 2003), indicating that higher education research was a developing, inter-disciplinary area of activity, with a number of fairly distinct groups of researchers pursuing their own interests and agendas with little reference to each other. I also suspected that these patterns were probably not unique to higher education research. Let us explore the evidence on that further.
Figure 3.1 A possible structuring of the higher education research community/tribe Note: The numbers refer to how many times each pair of authors was cited in the same article.
Citation analysis applied to other areas of research As a starting point, I already knew that three members of the Ramsden cluster in Figure 3.1 – Biggs, Marton and Entwistle – appeared as leading members of a learning style cluster in a recent analysis of the educational psychology literature (Desmedt and Valcke 2004, p. 451), indicating how fields of practice and research, and frames of analysis, overlap. My next step was to see what general texts there might be on citation and co-citation analysis. A quick library search showed that the field had been well established for some decades. Thus, Garfield (1979), showed how citation indexing had been used to both trace the development of ideas over time, and to map the structure of science through the identification of major clusters of citations and their linkages (for a non-citational, qualitative, and ambitious, approach to the same topics, see Collins 1998). Nicholas and Ritchie (1978) noted how citation patterns varied between disciplines or
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subjects in the social sciences: ‘on average, subjects cite themselves about two-thirds of the time. However, a whole range of distribution lies scattered around this mean. Social welfare and geography actually cite themselves less than they do other subjects’ (p. 105). They also noted how the citation of items from different countries varies from country to country, with the United States standing out as both the most cited source country overall, but with US-based authors also the least likely to cite non-American sources (1978, p. 116). Hargens (2000) took such inter-disciplinary study further, examining reference networks and contexts in seven different research areas, varying from astronomers writing about celestial masers, to literary critics looking at the work of Toni Morrison, to economists studying rational expectations. He identified the varied use of what he termed ‘orienting reference lists’, through which authors offer contextual literature for their work and offered two ‘conjectures’ for further research: ‘First, reference networks exhibiting low citation densities are also likely to exhibit undercitation of recent work, . . . Second, overcitation of both foundational and recent papers in a reference network are unlikely to occur simultaneously’ (2000, p. 860). Online searches in a variety of academic databases confirmed that there was a substantial literature on citations, complete with its own specialist journals. Two things immediately stood out: first, these studies appeared to be skewed towards particular subject areas, notably organization and information studies; second, that researchers had gone well beyond the fairly simple frequency and cross-tabulation techniques I had applied to use multivariate methods such as cluster analysis, factor analysis and multidimensional scaling. Table 3.1 summarizes some of the key findings from 14 articles identified in this way. While many of the articles identified appear in specialist journals targeted at information scientists, most notably Scientometrics, the techniques have also been applied to the study of citation patterns in more established fields, such as sociology and philosophy, and to many sub-disciplines within the sciences. The tendency to use complex multivariate analysis techniques is clear in Table 3.1, as well as a reliance on established databases – such as the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) – and software programmes designed for their analysis. This reliance on established databases is, of course, both a strength, in that time-consuming data collection is avoided, and a weakness, in that these databases do not include all journals (or books). Thus, in my own analysis, I had avoided the use of existing databases for the latter reason, and also kept the analysis techniques straightforward. Nonetheless, most of the findings of the studies reviewed tend to confirm the kinds of patterns I found in my own analyses of higher education research. For example:
• the existence of fairly discrete groupings of researchers (and their associated journals), with relatively little overlap or common membership
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• • • • • •
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(Hargens 2000, pp. 848–9 notes that ‘research areas typically have fewer than 50 active participants’); the identification of research groupings with particular methods and topics; the relative under-engagement with theory of authors in developing fields of study (cf. Tight 2004); the divisions evident in practice-linked fields between researchers and practitioners; the differences in citation practices between books and journals, and the greater emphasis often given to the former (in both books and journals); the divide evident between North America and Europe or the rest of the world, with North American referencing practices being rather more insular (cf. Tight 2007); the finding that significant numbers of researchers are fairly isolated.
So higher education research does not seem so different from many other areas of research, particularly in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
What does this suggest about academic research? While it would be foolish to generalize too far on the basis of the studies reviewed here, the findings are suggestive. Three points seem to me to be worthy of further consideration. First, there is a sense in which most areas of academic research are ‘developing’. While a researcher like me, working in the area of higher education, may feel particularly low status and/or vulnerable – after all, higher education research is a branch of educational research, a fairly recent entrant to the university and barely recognized, if at all, by most as a discipline – these feelings may be more general than we think. Even in established disciplines, like physics, sociology or philosophy, many, perhaps most, researchers are working, to use that wonderful phrase, ‘at the frontiers of knowledge’. This is, after all, what they are supposed to be doing as researchers, and is a key way to get ahead, get a career and recognition in academe. So many researchers, in this position – particularly outside of the laboratory sciences, where some group camaraderie is normal (together with all of the corresponding tensions that can involve) – will have feelings of relative isolation and exposure. They will be working in the context of a subdiscipline or area of study, and they may be the only person in their department or university working in that area. Research can, therefore, be a lonely experience, and many academic researchers will feel – at least from time to time – somewhat unsure about what they are doing and why. They may doubt the value of their research, whether it will work, what its contribution will be, whether it will be recognized and where it is going.
Management Information Systems
Public Relations research
Organizational Analysis
Culnan 1986
Pasadeos and Renfro 1992
Usdiken and Pasadeos 1995
Information Science
Information Retrieval Studies
White and McCain 1998
Ding, Chowdury and Foo 1999
Cronin, Snyder Sociology and Atkins 1997
Subject
Source
Key findings
1990–1992 North American authors largely ignore European work; but, while European authors cite North American work, these are largely different authors to those cited by the North Americans.
1972–1982 A young academic field, nine clusters identified, of which four remained current throughout the period. Poor linkage to organizational theory. 1975–1989 A maturing field, with increasing numbers of citations within the field rather than outside, and more authors educators rather than practitioners. Books cited more often than other sources. Half-life of publications five years.
Period studied
Focused on 39 highly cited researchers, 1987–1997 Showed consistency and movement of using multi-dimensional scaling, factor authors over period. analysis and clustering techniques.
Compared 90 monographs with 24 top- 1985–1993 ‘there may be two populations of highly ranked journals. cited authors, one which is highly cited in monographs and one which is highly cited in journals’ (p. 269) Focused on 12 key journals, identifying 1972–1995 12 specialities identified, the two largest, 120 top authors. Used Social SciSearch, experimental retrieval and citation analysis, factor and cluster analysis. having virtually no common members.
Compared North American authors in one journal with European authors in another (92 articles). Produced cocitation networks and clusters.
Focus on four journals (329 articles)
Focus on 47 researchers, using SSCI and factor analysis.
Methods used
Table 3.1 Key findings from 14 subject-specific co-citation articles
Semiconductor research
Learning Styles
International Management
Urban Studies
Entrepreneurship Uses SSCI, identifying 733 articles. research
Tsay, Xu and Wu 2003
Desmedt and Valcke 2004
Acedo and Casillas 2005
Liu 2005
Schildt, Zahra and Sillanpaa 2006
Focuses on 38 representative journals, using data from Social SciSearch and cluster analysis, multi-dimensional scaling and factor analysis.
2000–2004 Identifies 25 central research streams. Concludes that research in the field is highly fragmented, non-cumulative, US-focused with isolated individuals.
1992–2002 Identified four key clusters of journals.
Focused on 30 most productive 1978–1997 Found three main clusters of journals, in journals, using SciSearch, cluster physics, material science and electrical and analysis and multi-dimensional scaling. electronic engineering. Used SSCI and Bibexcel. 1972–2001 Found little overlap between the learning Straightforward citation and co-citation style and the (larger and more complex) analyses. cognitive style clusters of authors. Focused on five top journals (583 1997–2000 Identified eight main groups or paradigms. articles). Applied multi-dimensional Concludes that it is an eclectic, multiscaling, cluster analysis and disciplinary field. correspondence factor analysis.
Focus on 2114 documents in five North 1986–2000 Primarily methodological American journals. Six methods of recommendations. cluster comparison used.
Organization Studies
Three ‘invisible colleges’ identified: learning researchers, research on teaching, sociology of education.
1980–1993 Five main clusters identified, differentiated in terms of their method (qualitative or quantitative) and focus on philosophy of science or epistemology.
Gmur 2003
Focus on 62 authors, using AHCI, multi-dimensional scaling and cluster analysis.
Focused on 104 professors at 8 Finnish ‘five latest universities, with data collected years’ through questionnaires and citation counts. Used social network analysis.
Philosophy
Tuire and Erno Educational 2001 research
Kreuzman 2001
62 The politics and culture of university research Second, because of its continuous development, division (and competition) are endemic in academic research. Admittedly, citation and co-citation studies, particularly when they make use of techniques like cluster and factor analysis, are designed to identify divisions (even, perhaps, where they do not exist in practice). But such divisions do exist in practice, for they are at the very core of the academic experience. We pursue our research careers by distinguishing ourselves from others in our disciplines, sub-disciplines or subject areas (or by creating new ones). We present ourselves as experts, or at the very least as specialists, in x, with x being distinguished not only in terms of its topic area, but also by its preferred methodology and theoretical framework. Third, the necessary corollary of division is allegiance. As researchers, we choose (or are chosen) to work with like-minded others: other specialists or experts in our topic, methodology and/or theoretical framework. While we may work directly, in the laboratory, field or office, with some of these people, they are more usually recognized – by others, particularly, but not only, those doing citation studies – through those we cite in our writings. As specialists in x, we naturally refer to other, previous and current (perhaps emphasizing one or the other), specialists in x when we write. But we don’t just refer to any and all specialists in x, but to chosen groups, showing our allegiances and history, as well as our enmities and ignorance. While we may, perhaps, meet members of our reference groups from time to time, most notably on the international conference circuit, we may only have regular dealings with some of them at a distance, using email and other internet-based technologies.
Confirmatory and complementary findings How, then, do these findings – regarding academic isolation, division and allegiance – match up with those produced from other kinds of research into research? While academic research is not, perhaps curiously, the most widely researched aspect of academic work and life (Tight 2003), there are a number of recent studies of relevance that may be reviewed in this context. That these studies are relatively unconnected serves to further confirm the findings discussed here. As they are considered at greater length elsewhere in this volume, they will only be briefly considered here. First, there is the ‘tribes and territories’ literature, which draws attention to shifting academic specialisms and fragmentation within disciplines: [s]pecialisms, it might seem, can only be defined in terms of the labels with which groups of people choose to identify themselves at any given time. To make matters worse, specialist fields may, like disciplines, themselves be represented as subject to internal fragmentation. (Becher and Trowler 2001, p. 66) Becher and Trowler also touch specifically on citation practices, noting how disciplines differ in this respect (2001, pp. 114–16).
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Second, there is the phenomenographic research on research (e.g. Åkerlind 2008; Brew 2001), which has examined how research is experienced and viewed by researchers. My interpretation of these studies, for present purposes, is that they are essentially complementary to, rather than confirmatory of, citation studies. In other words, they chiefly focus on other aspects of the research experience than those illuminated by citation analyses. Division and allegiance are apparent, to some degree, but in terms of differing perceptions of research rather than the individual experience of it. Third, there is research that has examined the postgraduate research experience. While much of this has focused on the student’s perspective, some has also considered that of the academic supervisor. Thus, Delamont et al. (2000) draw attention to the key role of research student supervision in academic socialization, and the creation of academic genealogies and generations; while noting the tendency of supervisors to explain their supervisory practices in distinction to those (perceived as poorer practices) they themselves experienced. Continuing links between supervisor and supervised are also demonstrated through citation studies. Fourth, there is work that has examined the relationship between higher education and government policy (e.g. Kogan and Henkel 1983). This has shown how ‘invisible colleges of academics’ (Kogan and Hanney 2000, p. 229) do, at particular times and in particular areas, have influence on public policy matters; but what is telling is that they are composed primarily of institutional leaders rather than researchers. Similarly, Lucas (2006) has shown how the need to be strategic to win at the Research Assessment Exercise game in the United Kingdom has strengthened the position of institutional managers. We might, therefore, expect an increasing dichotomy in the research experience, with the minority of successful, well-funded academic researchers working in collaborative groupings, and the majority even more isolated, carrying out research for personal interest at the margins of their time. Seen from this broader perspective, if we wish to develop a fuller, more rounded, picture of what is going on in academic research, we clearly need to bring to bear a variety of techniques and forms of evidence – qualitative and quantitative – and adopt a pragmatic research strategy (Tashakkori and Teddlie 1998).
Conclusion This chapter has, hopefully, demonstrated that citation and co-citation studies have something to offer in the study of academic research. These techniques are particularly useful in identifying linkages between researchers and over time, and in building up a picture of the overall structure of research in disciplines and subject areas. Citation and co-citation studies cannot, of course, provide us with the total picture: for that we need to use a mixture of techniques and see how their findings confirm or complement (or contradict) each other.
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The analysis presented should also have indicated that there is plentiful scope for further research in this area. From my own position, focusing on the field of higher education research, I am particularly interested in extending my existing citation and co-citation studies to examine the development of the field over time. I would also like to link this to a more qualitative study, which would explore why academics cite in the ways that they do, how they structure their areas of research, and why apparently related groups of researchers appear to have so little to do with each other. Finally, moving from the personal back to the political, the discussion also has relevance to the contemporary moves in the United Kingdom to use citation data in the evaluation and funding of academic research (and, within institutions, in the remuneration and promotion of individual academics). Here the message has to be cautionary, and particularly so in less-established fields of research. Yes, bibliometric data like this does tell us something – indeed much – about how research is received and valued, but it clearly does not tell us everything. And, if research funding came to be based largely on such data, changes in citation practices – driven no doubt by institutional managers – would very quickly follow.
References Acedo, F. and Casillas, J. (2005) Current paradigms in the international management field: an author co-citation analysis, International Business Review, 14: 619–39. Åkerlind, G. (2008) An academic perspective on research and being a researcher: an integration of the literature, Studies in Higher Education, 33(1): 17–31. Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Culture of Disciplines, 2nd edn. Buckingham: Open University Press. Brew, A. (2001) The Nature of Research: Inquiry in Academic Contexts. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Collins, R. (1998) The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Cronin, B. (1984) The Citation Process: The Role and Significance of Citations in Scientific Communication. London: Taylor Graham. Cronin, B., Snyder, H. and Atkins, H. (1997) Comparative citation rankings of authors in monographic and journal literature: a study of sociology, Journal of Documentation, 53(3): 263–73. Culnan, M. (1986) The intellectual development of management information systems, 1972–1982: a co-citation analysis, Management Science, 32(2): 156–72. Delamont, S., Atkinson, P. and Parry, O. (2000) The Doctoral Experience: Success and Failure in Graduate School. London: Falmer. Desmedt, E. and Valcke, M. (2004) Mapping the learning styles ‘jungle’: an overview of the literature based on citation analysis, Educational Psychology, 24(4): 445–64. Ding, Y., Chowdury, G. and Foo, S. (1999) Mapping the intellectual structure of information retrieval studies: an author co-citation analysis, 1987–1997, Journal of Information Science, 25(1): 67–78. Garfield, E. (1979) Citation Indexing: Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology and Humanities. New York: John Wiley.
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Gmur, M. (2003) Co-citation analysis and the search for invisible colleges: a methodological evaluation, Scientometrics, 57(1): 27–57. Hargens, L. (2000) Using the literature: reference networks, reference contexts and the social structure of scholarship, American Sociological Review, 65: 846–65. Hyland, K. (2000) Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Harlow: Longman. Kogan, M. and Hanney, S. (2000) Reforming Higher Education. London: Jessica Kingsley. Kogan, M. and Henkel, M. (1983) Government and Research: The Rothschild Experiment in a Government Department. London: Heinemann. Kreuzman, H. (2001) A co-citation analysis of representative authors in philosophy: examining the relationship between epistemologists and philosophers of science, Scientometrics, 51(3): 525–39. Liu, Z. (2005) Visualizing the intellectual structure in urban studies: a journal co-citation analysis (1992–2002), Scientometrics, 62(3): 385–402. Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. NCIHE (National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education) (1997) Higher Education in the Learning Society (Chair Sir Ron Dearing). London: HMSO. Nicholas, D. and Ritchie, M. (1978) Literature and Bibliometrics. London: Clive Bingley. Pasadeos, Y. and Renfro, B. (1992) A bibliometric analysis of public relations research, Journal of Public Relations Research, 4(3): 167–87. Schildt, H., Zahra, S. and Sillanpaa, A. (2006) Scholarly communities in entrepreneurship research: a co-citation analysis. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 30(3): 399–415. Tashakkori, A. and Teddlie, C. B. (1998) Mixed Methodology: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Tight, M. (2003) Researching Higher Education. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Tight, M. (2004) Higher education research: an atheoretical community of practice? Higher Education Research and Development, 23(4): 395–411. Tight, M. (2006) Higher education research: a citation analysis, Higher Education Review, 38(2): 42–59. Tight, M. (2007) Bridging the divide: a comparative analysis of articles in higher education journals published inside and outside North America, Higher Education, 53(2): 235–53. Tight, M. (2008) Higher education research as tribe, territory and/or community: a co-citation analysis, Higher Education, 55(5): 593–608. Tsay, M-Y., Xu, H. and Wu, C-W. (2003) Journal co-citation analysis of semiconductor literature, Scientometrics, 57(1): 7–25. Tuire, P. and Erno, L. (2001) Exploring invisible scientific communities: studying networking relations within an educational research community: a Finnish case, Higher Education, 42: 493–513. Usdiken, B. and Pasadeos, Y. (1995) Organizational analysis in North America and Europe: a comparison of co-citation networks, Organization Studies, 16(3): 503–26. Warner, J. (2000) A critical review of the application of citation studies to the Research Assessment Exercise, Journal of Information Science, 26(6): 453–60. White, H. (2004) Citation analysis and discourse analysis revisited, Applied Linguistics, 25(1): 89–116. White, H. and McCain, K. (1998) Visualizing a discipline: an author co-citation analysis of information science, 1972–1995, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49(4): 327–55.
4 Research management and research cultures: power and productivity Lisa Lucas
Introduction The evolution of national systems of university research funding and evaluation has had a long and turbulent history both in the UK and Australia since the 1980s. In the UK, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which was first introduced in 1986, has gone through many transfigurations in each successive exercise until RAE 2008 and proposals for a move to a Research Excellence Framework (REF) are currently underway (www.hefce.ac.uk/ research/ref). This marks an evolution from a more qualitative peer-review exercise to a more quantitative bibliometrics-based system. The Australian system has moved from the Research Quantum Exercise, primarily based on measures of quantitative indicators of research income, number of publications and numbers of research students through a long process of consultation for a Research Quality Framework (RQF), employing both quantitative and qualitative indicators, which has now been abandoned. Discussions are still underway as to the future system to be implemented. The merits and problems of different national research funding and evaluation systems have been addressed by Ian McNay in Chapter 2. What is significant here is the impact that these systems have had on the management and organization of research cultures and research work within university departments. As a result of such exercises, academic work, and research work in particular, is under more scrutiny than ever before and key performance indicators and forms of monitoring of research are now well established within universities (Lucas 2006). Much of the focus is on the role of the individual as the site of productivity and individualized performance indicators support this. However, the social nature of academic life and the necessity for understanding the socio-cultural nature of research productivity are often overlooked. In the literature on academic research ‘productivity’, for example, the focus tends to be more on the individual and the problematizing of the individual role in research success, rather than a more socio-cultural
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understanding of the collective role in ensuring research engagement within academic departments. The aim of this chapter is to focus on understanding the complexities of research management and departmental research cultures; to explore the development of research cultures of collaboration and support within academic departments, particularly ways in which research cultures can support and enable staff to engage in research. However, attention is also drawn to the possible tensions between research cultures which are set up to enable academic engagement in research and the extent to which they also serve a dual function of ensuring greater control over this engagement and a means to ensure that it fits with departmental and institutional research priorities, heavily influenced by the demands of the funding and evaluation regimes.
Tensions and contradictions Much has been written about new management structures in higher education and in particular on the changing forms of middle management and how this might be conceptualized (Clegg and McAuley 2005). The idea of ‘new managerialism’ has been introduced and the key argument presented by Deem, Hillyard and Reed (2008) being that ‘new managerialism’ should be understood as an amalgamation of multiple ideologies but with two key aspects: that of ‘market-based resource allocation’ and ‘managerial control regimes’ (2008, p. 4), and the emphasis on ‘performance, accountability and control’ (2008, p. 20). Other chapters in this book have focused on the impacts of commercialization and marketization of academic research (see chapters by Margaret Thornton and Luidvika Leisˇyte˙ and colleagues), but the idea of ‘control regimes’ is more pertinent to the concerns of this chapter. Much has been written to support the idea that there has been a significant rise in the mechanisms utilized within universities to measure research performance, increase the need for academics to account for how they spend their working time and ultimately for institutional managers to attempt to assert greater control over academic work. This literature would appear to indicate that there are similar processes at work leading to comparable experiences for academics in the UK and Australia. It is argued by some that academics will continue to resist strong managerialist forces in favour of a more collegial and inter-personal approach (Prichard 2000). As Deem, Hillyard and Reed (2008) argue, there is no simple way of understanding management processes within universities, which, as a result of competing ideologies, discourses and values, can create a ‘fragmenting and hybridizing dynamic’ resulting in more mediated management structures where control is exercised from a ‘distance’ and where there exist forms of ‘regulated autonomy’ characterized by ‘soft bureaucracy’ (Deem et al. 2008, p. 5). This mix of values is supported by the research on middle managers by Clegg and McAuley (2005) where the middle manager is characterized in a variety of ways from an ‘agent of control’ to a ‘corporate bureaucrat’ to a ‘transmitter
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of core strategic values’, taking up any or all of these positions at any one time. This is in part encapsulated in the term ‘academic-manager’, which underscores the amalgamation of the continued existence of different fundamental values and cultures (Deem et al. 2008) embodied in these individuals who straddle the cultures of ‘academia’ and ‘management’. The complexities of managerial processes are often discussed in the light of competing cultures in higher education, whereby academic cultures and the expression of academic values can be seen as a site of resistance to ‘new managerialist’ cultures. But the term ‘culture’ is a slippery one and ill defined, particularly within higher education institutions. Culture within organizations can be defined in relation to ‘artifacts, espoused values and basic underlying assumptions’ (Hanson et al. 1999, p. 191). However, an understanding of culture also has to engage with the notion of power and struggles over key values and meanings within social situations. Lucas (2006) explored this in relation to the definitions of ‘research’ and being ‘researchactive’ that characterize forms of ‘research capital’ within UK university departments. She explored the struggles over the power to define what ‘research’ and ‘research-active’ mean in different contexts. Power differentials of status and gender and other factors are also significant (Reay 2004). Explorations of ‘cultures’, therefore, must be understood as important sites of struggle over meanings and values and what counts as ‘symbolic capital’ in that social world and not simply as benign social spaces where common values are shared (Bourdieu 1988). There is a significant literature that has looked at the impact of research funding and evaluation systems in both the UK and Australia as well as many other countries (Harman 2000; Harley 2002; Lucas 2006). There is also an eclectic literature, which has looked at the management of research within universities and strategies for achieving success (Hanson et al. 1999) and some which have looked specifically at the significance of research culture in achieving success (Pratt et al. 1999). However, what is of interest in this chapter is the dual aspects of management (taking the characteristics in particular of ‘new managerialism’) merged with an interest in the role of middle managers in constructing or influencing research cultures. MacGregor, Rix, Aylward and Glynn (2006) identify four key aspects of research management in their survey-based study of academics in Australian commerce and business faculties. These aspects are ‘research management’, ‘research nurturing’, ‘research indicators’ and ‘research priorities’. Factors, which loaded onto ‘research management’ included, the ‘Effectiveness of the faculty research managements structure’ and ‘Whether the faculty encourages interdisciplinary research’. Factors, which loaded onto ‘Research nurturing’ include, ‘Whether it nurtures new researchers’ and ‘To what extent the Faculty fosters research mentoring among staff’. Their findings showed that there were differences according to gender and disciplines. Women academics tended to rate ‘research nurturing’ as more important whereas male academics rated ‘research management’ as more important. Differences were also shown in how academics from different disciplines
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rated these factors as important. An explanation of these differences was not adequately given and so questions are raised as to why departments may emphasize particular aspects more than others and indeed how we might explain gender and disciplinary differences. What this implies, perhaps, is that research management has to be understood in relation to the wider organizational culture within departments. In order to begin to understand organizational culture, Tierney (2008) provides a helpful framework, which can be adapted to explore aspects of research cultures within university departments, although he cautions that ‘organizational culture can be maddeningly obscure’ and that there is no single model that can fit all circumstances (Tierney 2008, p. 28). The key aspects identified by Tierney (2008) are shown in Table 4.1. Table 4.1 is helpful in attempting to chart the different aspects of departmental research cultures and as Tierney (2008) continually emphasizes, all these aspects may be open to differing interpretation by different individuals within this social sphere. However, as argued earlier, it is important also to analyse the power dynamics and differentials at work within each of these aspects. Power is conceptualized here, following Foucault (1994), not solely as an exercise of force or control, but also in terms of the productivity of power and the constitution of subjectivity through power relations. Table 4.1 A framework of organizational culture Key aspects
What this means in social organizations
Mission
• How institution’s participants define the overarching ideology
Environment
• Interpretive act that provides meaning, direction and purpose • The world is socially constructed and so the environment is not
of the organization
so much as given fact but rather is something constantly considered, redefined, and reinterpreted Leadership
• Leaders enact scripts through an interpretive lens that enables them to act and communicate in particular ways
• Who the leaders are and whether the organization permits only formal leaders or relies on informal leaders are contingent on culture Strategy
• Includes cultural norms surrounding key issues such as how decisions get made (and) by whom
Information
• Who is privy to information and how information gets conveyed plays a key role in facilitating or impeding organizational change
Socialization
• How individuals learn about the organization and what they learn by whom are key signals for newcomers about what the organization values and how they should act
Source: Tierney (2008, p. 28).
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This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (Foucault 1994, p. 331) It is important to explore, therefore, not only the explicit forms of research management as a means to control academic research work but also the more insidious forms of cultural change within departments, which serve to constitute the academic research ‘subject’.
Case study: research management and research cultures in education departments A research project was carried out in 2003–4, involving semi-structured interviews with 40 academics in education departments in three Scottish and two English universities. The sample chosen included a mix of male and female academics across the status range from lecturer to senior lecturer and professor and included heads of departments and other senior administrators. Further semi-structured interviews were also conducted with a small sample of six academics at one research-intensive university in Australia. Findings from the study in the UK institutions have been published elsewhere (Deem and Lucas 2007). For the purposes of comparison, the chapter draws on data from one Scottish pre-1992 research-intensive university (Parkside University) and one Australian research-intensive institution (Waterside University). Both of these education departments were previously colleges of teacher education and merged with their universities in the past 10–15 years approximately. Both departments are involved with initial teacher education (ITE) and a wide range of postgraduate and continuing professional development programmes. The interview data utilized in this chapter is primarily from senior academic-managers and professors within the two departments (identified by pseudonyms). Given the small sample being drawn on, the perspective presented is of course partial and not generalizable beyond these specific contexts. However, preliminary findings can usefully inform future research work. Education departments have a unique socio-historical and socio-cultural context, which makes them different from other social science subjects as well as areas from the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. However, these education departments provide
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interesting case studies of the potential for research development in departments, which have historically not been research-orientated and chart an interesting set of developments from a primarily teaching-oriented culture to a more research-oriented one and the means by which academicmanagers and research leaders believe this can be achieved. The aspects identified by Tierney (2008), shown in Table 4.1 provide a framework for exploration.
Research mission and the changing role expectation for academic staff The education departments at Parkside and Waterside exhibit a similar socio-historical background with previously teaching-dominated education colleges being merged with research-intensive universities with a consequent drive to increase quite dramatically the research activity of academic staff. This historical background is common across education departments in Australia and the UK and fairly similar historical narratives can be found at each institution. At Waterside, Professor Blackfoot, states that ‘Basically [with] the teachers’ college, people were not researchers at all’ and ‘[The] university had very much (a research) agenda so it has taken some settling down over the years.’ Similarly, at Parkside, there was an expectation that a predominantly teaching-only staff would change to become research active. Professor Huntley emphasizes that having been previously colleges of education, they are coming from a low research base and that they are still ‘working up’ to compete in the RAE but there is a recognition of the difficulties with this as he acknowledge that ‘It’s almost inevitable that we’ll fail to get near (the top grades) of a 5 or 5*.’ The key mission of these departments, therefore, is to increase research productivity and to gain a good rating in the relevant research funding and evaluation exercises. So it is clear that the policy drivers in the UK and Australia are central to how success in research terms is measured as can be seen from the following quotations: [A] Faculty, which [is] research oriented . . . and [the institution] stipulated that they wanted a 4 [high RAE grade] from every department . . . [so] that had to be our target, so we reduced the number of staff that we included in 2001 as against 1996, like so many places as you know, [and] got our 4, but it was on reduced numbers. Obviously we had many more research active people than the RAE submission would show, but a good number of them are not RAE standard . . . [with] fewer publications or not as highly rated publications. (Professor Bentley, Parkside University) [T]his is quite a successful university in research terms, so we’re very conscious of the fact that we’ve got to raise the Faculty’s game, and that
72 The politics and culture of university research there are, I suppose, mixed signals about how to do that and what that means in a sense. So Australian universities, particularly ones like this, operate on a small set of quantitative indicators of research performance – it’s research grants, publications, PhD completions. And those three are the keys in the funding formula for research . . . and when push comes to shove, those are the key things at the Faculty level too. (Professor Lightfoot, Waterside University) There are mixed messages and confusion, however, over how the drive for greater research activity and excellence should be achieved and dual discourses of pressure and control as well as strategies of support and encouragement for ensuring that academic staff are successful in being research-active in ways appropriate to meet the demands of the funding and evaluation exercises. There are clear tensions between, on the one hand, attempting to demand and control the potential research productivity of staff in these departments with a recognition that this is not a straightforward process and that management pressure alone will not achieve this. On the other hand, there is a recognition that a cultural change is necessary, particularly one which provides an element of support to academic staff in order to enable them to achieve successfully in research.
Research strategies and research leadership The strategies for research in each of these education departments are clearly influenced by the demands of the national evaluation and funding systems and, as Professor Lightfoot explains, the need to win the ‘ratings war’. As a result of this, a points scheme is operated at Waterside University whereby those members of staff who are successful in gaining external funding or publications can be awarded points and consequently obtain a moderate amount of research funding. There was also a proposal, for example, to compile a ‘golden list of journals’, and to award additional funds to staff who published in these journals. However, there was a recognition that such a move may be counterproductive within a social science discipline given the breadth of journals and other publication outlets. The idea of a points systems mirrors, to a great extent, the points systems awarded at the national level, for example, in relation to publications where a singleauthored (research) book is given a 5.0 weighting, an article in a scholarly journal 1.0 and a refereed conference paper also 1.0 (Harman 2000). Individuals are encouraged to publish in ways that will secure recognition and for many this might be to ensure large numbers of refereed conference papers and journal articles. At Parkside University, the department is rewarded by having the funds from the RAE redistributed back proportionately to those departments who were successful. So a key strategy at both institutions, therefore, is to reward success with research funding, although at the departmental level at Parkside
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rather than at the individual level, as at Waterside. Where academics can demonstrate that they are successful in research, these research funds can then be utilized to allow more time for research for academic staff. At Parkside, for example funds allocated for research (from the RAE) can enable departments to allocate time for research for research-active staff. At Parkside, this approximates to allowing one day per week for staff to concentrate on research and there can be a ‘negotiating of timetables’ to allow for this. However, while Professor Huntley endorses this, there is also a recognition of the difficulties of achieving it, given the significantly high teaching loads for staff at Parkside. [There is heavy] involvement in initial teacher education, we have a lot of mainstream teaching to do, so things like sabbaticals are really hard to arrange and I . . . know that there are colleagues whose research output could be greater had they more time to concentrate . . . I sympathise. (Professor Huntley, Parkside University) A further aspect of the research strategy at Waterside University is to provide ‘seed corn funding’ for initial research projects, which reiterates the concern to reward and support potentially successful research ideas. However, these strategies are utilized to direct resources to academics who can demonstrate success in research in ways demanded by the departments. Where academics are not deemed successful in research for the purposes of national evaluation and funding exercises, then they may receive less support. At Parkside, for example, this may result in a member of staff not being submitted to the RAE and so being deemed research-inactive. In response to this, a higher teaching or administration workload may be given to these individuals resulting in a negative research ‘productivity cycle’ as they can devote less and less time to research activity. Another central aspect of organizational culture identified by Tierney (2008) is leadership and this is important also to the development of research cultures within these education departments. Both Professor Huntley at Parkside and Professor Lightfoot at Waterside see themselves as having significant leadership roles in research. For Professor Huntley, this is in relation to his role as head of department, whereas Professor Lightfoot was appointed to lead research within the department, being appointed as the Associate Dean for research of the Faculty with a remit to develop a five-year strategic plan: The faculty has a research committee, which I chair. That committee plus a few other individuals and groups have a role in strategy formation but also in, you know, monitoring what’s going on in terms of our work. I do quite a bit in terms of, for example, setting up events for people to help them develop research proposals to enhance their publications profiles to take a more planful approach to the research side of their academic career. I’ve got a budget that funds a number of schemes.
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We have a scheme that rewards research productivity, so I manage aspects of that. We have research clusters within the faculty, and I look after budget allocations for those and kind of monitor what they’re doing. (Professor Lightfoot, Waterside University) In terms of strategies and forms of leadership in these two departments, there seems to be a clear policy of rewarding academic research success and definitions of this are heavily influenced by the respective national systems of research funding and evaluation. However, it is clear from the evidence in both education departments that there were, and continue to be, many academics who struggle to construct a research profile, a situation which points schemes or manipulation of workloads may do very little to change. This requires a focus on other key aspects of Tierney’s (2008) framework, namely, information, environment and socialization.
Research communities: information, environment and socialization This section focuses on ideas expressed for creating a productive research environment and the means of information dissemination alongside additional strategies for the socialization of what previously were predominantly teaching staff into a research culture. There is a recognition that the cultural environment has to be conducive to encouraging staff in their research endeavours with a focus on collective as opposed to individual responsibility. Professor Lightfoot talks about the need to create more collaborative and inclusive research cultures, which may be at odds with the primary emphasis on the individual and individual achievement in relation to research: [One] can make that an individual person’s problem. You just say, ‘Unless you do this, you won’t be counted as research-active, [so] you’d better do it – we’ll put that into your personal development plan or your personal objectives for the next year and we’ll review you against that a year from now’ – you make it the individual’s problem . . . I know from other departments that I’ve worked in that if you want to be performing at a really top level in terms of work in the educational research field, then you need all sorts of processes and cultural things to be right to be conducive to that. And I think it has to work in an organic way, and there have to be ways that individuals feel themselves to be part of the larger culture and contributing to it and supported by it, rather than this rather fragmented and individualistic approach. (Professor Lightfoot, Waterside University) One key aspect of engaging staff in research, particularly where they have previously had little involvement is to encourage them to study for higher degrees and to become engaged in research seminars and workshops. Many
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of the staff in these two education departments were registered for a PhD or professional doctorate. The latter, in particular, is encouraged by Professor Huntley at Parkside University who argues that the cohort structure of professional doctorates can provide a ‘viable route for staff’ and provide them with a more ‘supportive environment’. At Parkside University, further opportunities for educational research qualifications are offered through Master’s degrees in educational research, which include the possibility of doing web-based research modules, in order to make them as accessible as possible to academic staff at Parkside and staff in other education departments across the sector. Another important aspect related to the research environment and information is the running of research seminars and workshops, which can encourage staff to participate and induct them into a community. Professor Bentley at Parkside University argues that it is important to provide research seminars and expose staff to the expertise of other researchers. Given the small university sector in Scotland, this can be managed in a way that draws on the expertise of researchers across the sector. The process of the creation of research groupings, which involves greater collaboration between staff as well as both formal and informal systems of mentoring, is important for the socialization of staff into engagement in research cultures. Research groupings or clusters were set up within each of these departments as a means of encouraging people to work together as well as giving a specific identity to areas of research specialism being highlighted. These groupings are intended to increase collaborative work and give academic staff a collective research home but they also serve as a signal to ensure conformity to a certain degree in relation to staff research focus and interests: I think you can try to create conditions where [collaboration] will happen but you can’t force it to happen unless there is willingness and confidence to it. Er, and I don’t think it works best for everybody. I think there are researchers who work best as individuals so it’s getting the mix right. You can’t force everybody in [groups] . . . but you do need to ensure that it is not just a collection of individuals who are all going in their own direction . . . I have a retired colleague, who in my mind was doing a lot of research, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the work in the department, or the strategic directive of the faculty and I think in some ways his departure has been quite helpful, although that is probably very unkind to him because he was a very serious researcher, but it was in an area that was hard to relate to mainstream educational work, shall we say. (Professor Huntley, Parkside University) This quotation from Professor Huntley captures very well the tensions inherent in the creation of departmental research cultures, which are, on the one hand, enabling, but, on the other, potentially constraining as academics are expected to engage in research which adequately fits with the aspirations and areas of specialism required by the department or faculty and which is
76 The politics and culture of university research heavily influenced by requirements for the national funding and evaluation exercises. Collaborative research activity is encouraged not just within departments but also across faculties and institutions. At Waterside University, there was a strong emphasis on collaboration across the faculty with funding bids being constructed with staff from a number of different departments and disciplines. At Parkside University, there was a greater emphasis on crossinstitutional collaboration, which resulted primarily from the Applied Educational Research Scheme (AERS), an initiative set up by the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council (SHEFC) to created extra funding for educational research in Scotland. The initiative was designed to encourage competitive bidding from education departments across the sector but in a surprise move, a consortium of education departments bid for the money collectively with a remit of further including all departments from across the sector in the subsequent projects (Ozga 2007). Alongside the creation of research groupings and greater opportunities for collaboration is the use of formal and informal mentoring, which is perceived to be of benefit to more junior and newer members of staff. The benefits of systems of mentoring have been shown in previous research (Gardiner et al. 2007), where it is argued that female academics can be more successful and productive in research when they have gone through a formal process of mentoring. Mentoring, however, implies a system of more experienced researchers working with less experienced or more junior staff. At Parkside, Professor Huntley explains that this aspect of socialization has been less prominent ‘because of the age profile [where] most staff are quite experienced’. Other forms of socialization such as involvement in research groupings and collaborations are therefore perceived to be more likely in education departments with a more senior academic demographic.
Conclusion There is clearly a need to better understand the different forms of research management within universities and how this relates to the development of departmental research cultures. It would appear that a holistic model incorporating ‘research management’ alongside ‘research nurturing’ (MacGregor et al. 2006) is perceived to be necessary by the academic-managers and researchers leaders within these education departments. The model given by Tierney (2008) can be utilized here to set out the key aspects of the organizational forms of research culture within these two education departments. The strategies being utilized to develop research cultures in relation to the research mission and other key aspects of the environment and forms of socialization are summarized in Table 4.2. In terms of strategies at the different departments, there are many similarities but also some differences. For example, at Waterside University there is
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Table 4.2 A framework of organizational culture Key aspects
How this relates to research cultures within the case study education departments
Mission
• To achieve a high rating in the relevant national system of research funding and evaluation
• To increase the percentage of ‘research-active’ staff within the department Environment
• Research seminars and workshops • Across department/faculty/university projects and collaborations
Leadership
Strategy
Information Socialization
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Variety of formal leaders Having key individuals as research leaders Research leaders developing research strategies Points system for research success Additional funding for research success (to departments, to individuals) Workload system Negotiating timetables Giving time for research (weekly allocation, sabbaticals) Funding doctorates for staff Seed corn money for initial research projects Research methods workshops and seminars Research funding available Research groups or clusters Mentoring Collaboration with colleagues
Source: Adapted from Tierney (2008).
a system of points allocation for research success whereas at Parkside there is an emphasis more on the manipulation of workloads to allow successful researchers more opportunity to concentrate on research work. National policy initiatives, such as the AERS scheme in Scotland, can also influence different research groupings and in this case encourage greater collaboration across institutions. The evidence presented here, although from a very small sample, raises important questions about the significance of the research cultures created within university departments and the role played by management structures in creating cultures of constraint and pressure versus enabling and supporting cultures. The data show the ways in which research managers and administrators are balancing these dual demands. This evidence also needs to be qualified as perhaps representing ideals that sympathetic research leaders may want to implement – rather than the reality of what is possible (particularly given economic and funding constraints). It is acknowledged by all of the participants that key aspects of these strategies are not easy to implement
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in difficult and pressurized academic environments, which demand staff to engage heavily in teaching and administration as well as research. In an ideal world, research time is made more available through sabbaticals and negotiation of teaching timetables but in reality these can be difficult to effect in practice. As Professor Huntley at Parkside maintains, he is sympathetic but rather powerless to create any significant change given that he has a role to play in ensuring that the department can compete effectively in the national research funding and evaluation exercise. Research management and institutional or departmental research cultures can be seen as twin aspects of the means by which attempts to control the work of academics are instigated. Tensions exist both in the management role itself and in the management strategies to encourage/demand greater research engagement and research success (as defined by national systems of research funding and evaluation) for academic staff. These tensions are played out in relation to the emphasis on individual responsibility versus a greater sense of community engagement and responsibility and the tension between supportive cultures that are possible but which also demand greater compliance from academic staff. Staff are encouraged to engage in research not in their own terms, but in the terms created by the department and by extension to the national funding and evaluation exercises. To paraphrase the old Marxian idiom, staff in these departments are being encouraged and to some extent supported to engage in research but perhaps not in conditions of their own choosing.
References Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clegg, S. and McAuley, J. (2005) Conceptualising middle management in higher education: a multifaceted discourse, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 27: 19–34. Deem, R., Hillyard, S. and Reed, M. (2008) Knowledge, Higher Education and the New Managerialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deem, R. and Lucas, L. (2007) Research and teaching cultures in two contrasting UK policy locations: academic life in education departments in five English and Scottish universities, Higher Education, 54: 115–33. Foucault, M. (1994) Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3. London: Penguin. Gardiner, M., Tiggeman, M., Kearns, H. and Marshall, K. (2007) Show me the money! An empirical analysis of mentoring outcomes for women in academia, Higher Education Research and Development, 26: 425–42. Hanson, D., Steen, J. and O’Donoghue, W. (1999) Management of basic research and development: lessons from the Australian experience, Prometheus, 17: 187–97. Harley, S. (2002) The impact of research selectivity on academic work and identity in UK universities, Studies in Higher Education, 27(2): 187–205. Harman, G. (2000) Allocating research infrastructure grants in post-binary higher education systems: British and Australian approaches, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 22(2): 111–26.
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Lucas, L. (2006) The Research Game in Academic Life. Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. MacGregor, R., Rix, M., Aylward, D. and Glynn, J. (2006) Factors associated with research management in Australian commerce and business faculties, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 28: 59–70. Ozga, J. (2007) Co-production of quality in the Applied Education Research Scheme, Research Papers in Education, 22: 169–81. Pratt, M., Margaritis, D. and Coy, D. (1999) Developing a research culture in a university faculty, Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 21: 43–55. Prichard, C. (2000) Making Managers in Universities and Colleges. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Reay, D. (2004) Cultural capitalists and academic habitus: classed and gendered labour in UK higher education, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27: 31–9. Tierney, W. G. (2008) Trust and organizational culture in higher education, in J. Valimaa and O. Ylijoki (eds) Cultural Perspectives on Higher Education (pp. 27–41). New York: Springer.
5 Creating collaboration: an exploration of multinational research partnerships Betty Rambur
Introduction Global partnerships with multinational teams are increasingly referenced as a means to approach the world’s most pressing problems. This chapter details an empirically inspired conceptual framework that posits five distinct types of inter-university, multinational research partnerships arrayed along a range of increasing faculty risk, decreasing stability, increasing human factors with compounding interaction costs, and increasing time to research outputs. This chapter will present the framework and discuss applications to fields and institutions across the USA, with implications for global institutions with US collaborators.
Background: the case for multinational research collaboratives Society’s most pressing threats are increasingly global in scale and perspective. The world’s grand challenges – global climate change, poverty, our energy future, a growing paucity of clean water, emerging infectious diseases, and terrorism to name but a few – demand fresh and vigorous perspectives. Clearly, the scale of these challenges is beyond the scope of a single discipline, institution, or even nation. Thus, what used to be undertaken in comparative isolation now calls for multi-institutional and multinational approaches. Multinational research offers important promises. Partnerships across countries can amass and harness intellectual and material resources, augment institutional gaps, and offer complementary strengths. At the same time, such ‘grand partnerships’ can be grand challenges in and of themselves. Barriers can include greater costs (Morahan et al. 2006) as well as difficulty in aligning varied internal and external cultures, incentive and funding mechanisms, externalities, and perhaps even motives and desired outcomes. Moreover, these facets become increasingly nuanced when partnerships span national
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boundaries and include diverse disciplines. As such, multinational research requires careful attention to assure sustained success. Despite such challenges, there are notable examples of thriving global research initiatives. To date, however, there have been relatively few systematic efforts to determine and enumerate the elements that seem to promote and/or discourage effective multinational research partnerships. This project offers a step toward that goal.
Context of the project This project was shaped by the context in which university faculty conduct research in the United States. Specifically, in the US there is an array of institutional types with differing overall missions and faculty incentive and reward systems. Community colleges, for example, focus on educational access, with comparatively few demands for faculty research and scholarship. Regional comprehensive colleges and universities focus primarily on teaching, with some but not primary emphasis on research and scholarship. Conversely, research universities define discovery of new knowledge as essential to their existence as teaching. Indeed, research may hold the lead role in faculty incentive and reward systems and be the predominant force shaping institutional culture. In such institutions, the faculty probationary period – typically six years – demands a trajectory of progressively more complex and independent research and scholarship, as appropriate for the discipline. Criteria for success, while typically somewhat locally defined, reference national or international impact inclusive of dissemination of work in leading international journals. In many disciplines, research of this magnitude demands substantial funding; thus, publishing to create a foundation for external funding is coupled with a need to obtain external funding to create work that is publishable. Typically, this cycle is quickly established and remains a career constant. Faculty who demonstrate success, determined by their departmental peers and the university-at-large through prescribed processes, are retained and offered tenure. Tenure, in turn, brings the promise of lifelong job security and unparalleled professional freedom. Conversely, faculty who do not obtain tenure will not be retained past the probationary period. Thus, in research universities, the stakes for probationary faculty are very high, as they must quickly demonstrate proclivity in both teaching and research, often with an emphasis on the latter. As a result, the presence or absence of a culture enabling interinstitutional research can have a profound impact on research direction and success. This includes but extends beyond the probationary period, as the career trajectory is developed and gains momentum during these initial years of faculty socialization. Moreover, graduate students are similarly socialized as they offer faculty support within their own educational process.
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Relationship of the current project to existing knowledge Perhaps as testimony to the increasing importance of research collaboratives, there is a growing body of literature that explores various aspects of interinstitutional partnerships. In some, the approach is conceptual. Bammer (2008), for instance, uses examples from three high impact projects to enumerate three management challenges facing individual collaboration leaders and managers: (1) harnessing differences; (2) setting boundaries; and (3) gaining authorization. Other studies draw models from careful analysis of cases within a single nation. Corley, Boardman, and Bozeman (2006), for example, offer a theoretical model in which the epistemic norms of the represented disciplines and the organizational structure of the collaboratives are interacting variables determining success, based on their analysis of two US cases. Other authors offer close examination of specific partnerships around a particular theme. Carey, Howard, Goldmon, Roberson, Godley, and Ammerman (2005), for example, discuss challenges facing US institutions with differing histories and cultures – a major research university and historically black college – who are engaging in community-participatory research, while Butcher and Jeffrey (2007) explore UK research student perception of successful and unsuccessful collaborative projects. At the multinational level, studies range from those ultimately impacting individuals or public health, such as John et al.’s (2004) discussion of a multinational, interdisciplinary breast cancer registry, to those whose backdrop is galactic, such as Zervos and Siegel’s (2008) analysis of transatlantic multi-public–private partnership for space programmes. Still others seek to define research collaboration (Katz and Martin, 1997) or explore individual collaboration strategies (Melin, 2000; Bozeman and Corley, 2004).
The current project This project undertook a different approach. The goal was to conduct a broad, inductive exploration of collaboratives that span nations from the perspective of those leading or managing such initiatives. Thus, the framework detailed in this chapter was derived from case explorations of researchintensive universities in the US and peer institutions – institutions with similar research aspirations – located in three additional continents. In all, perspectives from 15 cases with home universities in four continents were obtained. Respondents were participants and leaders of interinstitutional research collaboratives identified through a snowball sampling technique. Each, by nature of their leadership or administrative position, held responsibility for innumerable collaboratives of assorted natures. Respondents’ roles ranged from research oversight in a single faculty or college such as Associate Dean
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for Research to those who were responsible for an entire enterprise such as Vice President for Innovation, University Chancellor, or University President. An open-ended interview methodology was used. Potential respondents were asked to participate in a project whose goal was to detail elements foundational to sustained multinational, inter-institutional research. Consistent with recommendations by Denrell (2005), respondents were asked to recount details of collaboratives deemed successful as well as those deemed unsuccessful. The rationale for this orientation is that collaboratives deemed unsuccessful may indeed have used strategies similar to those in successful collaboratives; an important finding that would be obscured if successes formed ‘best practices’. When possible, failed collaboratives were also explored from the perspective of the lead faculty member(s). Open-ended, exploratory questions were posed to elicit narrative data, as outlined in Box 5.1. The key construct under study, ‘collaboration’, was purposefully not operationally defined, and instead open to interpretation and self-definition by respondents. This orientation followed the seminal analysis of Katz and Martin, who note that ‘collaboration is very difficult to define . . . What constitutes a collaboration therefore varies across institutions, fields, sectors and countries, and very probably changes over time as well’ (1997, p. 16). Thus, an open approach was undertaken to enable the most organic, unconstrained evolution of participants’ responses. Box 5.1 Opening interview questions
• • • • • • • • • • •
Describe your experiences with collaborative global research. What motivates your involvement in inter-institutional research? How do you define effectiveness? What ‘deliverables’ do you expect? In your experience, what is necessary for effective inter-institutional research to occur? In your experience, what is necessary for effective inter-institutional research to be maintained? What obstacles to inter-institutional research do you perceive? In your experience, what factors are counterproductive or inhibitory? Describe your perception of the ideal inter-institutional collaboration. Anything else you would like to share? Do you have suggestions of individuals I should interview?
Respondents were interviewed between October 2007 and April 2008. Each interview lasted about an hour. The semi-standardized exploratory nature of the orienting questions allowed for follow-up questions into unexpected terrain. A constant comparison, grounded theory methodology was then used to identify themes and patterns. The emergent model was then critiqued by
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a self-selected internal audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, where the author was an American Council on Education Fellow, and then presented to an international audience of the Ideas and Universities International Video Seminar Series. The following reflects a synthesis of these interactive, iterative critiques.
An emerging framework for multinational research collaboratives The collaboratives described by respondents demonstrated five distinct categories arrayed along a trajectory of increasing faculty risk, decreasing stability, increasing human factors with compounding interaction costs, and increasing time to research outputs. Each category differed in the number of interfaces that must be negotiated by institutions and individuals, with each ‘asymmetrical’ interface multiplying the potential for human factors to create interpersonal and programmatic tensions. Thus, the framework suggests an orientation in which it is the complexity of the institutional interfaces rather than the complexity of the research per se that increases interaction costs, often in ways that are unseen by the researchers. Thus, enabling structures, supports, and barriers differ markedly by category of collaborative typology. To illustrate the range of types, each category of collaborative will now be detailed in turn, for the purpose of illuminating the framework (see Figure 5.1. Please note that the diagonal line connecting these types is conceptual rather than literal). The cases are offered to illustrate the framework rather than as full discussion of each case, as the focus of this chapter is a presentation of the framework.
Figure 5.1 Conceptual framework for multinational research collaboratives
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Category 1: Parallel facility sharing Partnerships characterized by parallel sharing of facilities have limited interpersonal interaction among researchers and instead offer the shared use of space, equipment, or laboratories. Such partnerships may not demand interpersonal collaboration or even contact. As one respondent noted, ‘People aren’t working with each other, they are working with the equipment.’ Yet collaboration is essential to access this experimental world. An example of this prototype involves world-class telescopes, whereby different institutions have access to the equipment and resulting data at different times. Typically, this sort of research is among instructional peers with a shared scientific language. In essence, their scientific worlds are the same, even if their geographic world is not. In such partnerships, there is a rapid path to faculty productivity; as one respondent noted, ‘The table is set.’ Parallel sharing models are supported by strong administrative champions, formal institutional agreements, clear rules, and protocols defining co-existence. If, however, the work evolves toward genuine interaction, in essence evolving beyond parallel sharing, intellectual property issues may arise. The research in parallel sharing may be extraordinarily complex yet the interfaces between the institutions typically are not. Few human factors slow the speed to discovery. The term parallel sharing was chosen to describe this type of collaborative to reflect a similar concept drawn from developmental psychology. The term ‘parallel play’ was coined by Mildred Parten (1932). It refers to a stage in which preschool children play beside, rather than with, each other – exactly the phenomenon noted in this category of research. Parallel play among children is hypothesized to form the foundation for later, more cooperative, interactive play. Interestingly, in parallel play, preschool children often play side-by-side with larger toys or material objects. Parallel facility sharing may represent a developmental stage in research interactions that is conceptually similar to parallel play among preschool children.
Category 2: Data sharing collaboratives Data sharing collaboratives demonstrate three distinct types, each demanding progressive interaction and thus increasing interaction costs. These are (1) voluntary; (2) mandated de facto; and (3) mandated post hoc. Each of these subtypes will be described in turn. 1 Voluntary. Voluntary data sharing collaboratives function much like a parallel sharing model, however, a champion is not necessary, notable, or even desired. The typical impetus for this sharing is momentum or gain for individual work rather than genuinely joint projects. The kinds of data or outputs shared include electronic images and techniques or technology after patents have been obtained. These ‘partnerships’ can involve
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individuals in many nations. One interviewee, for example, reported ‘partners’ in 40 different nations. At the same time, these ‘partners’ had little if any actual interpersonal involvement or multi-authored work, as the ‘partnership’ involved archived data on a common platform. Thus, interaction costs were very low. Similar to parallel play collaboratives, these partnerships usually involved high technology sharing among institutional peers who hold a common scientific language. 2 Mandated de facto. Mandated de facto collaboratives are those that by the very nature of the work involve multiple, individually functioning partners in different sites or nations gathering similar sorts of data for a broader, unified purpose. An example of such partnerships is environmental monitoring. Each site has the potential to work in a largely independent manner, within the parameters of the overall project requirements. These are effective because coexistence is an a priori assumption. The coexistence is guided by gate-keeping protocols and reinforced by an overall uniformity of scientific languages and expectations. Again, however, conflicts can arise over intellectual property and ordering of the authors in publications. Nevertheless, for the most part, these collaboratives function relatively smoothly, as there are comparatively few interactions that increase time and conflict. 3 Mandated post hoc collaboratives. A very different set of challenges was found in collaboration that was required post hoc. These forced relationships – typically mandated by funders – were extraordinarily troubled. The partnerships tended to seem forced rather than natural to the researchers, neither arising from the nature of the work or spontaneous evolution of research questions. Thus, the necessary interactions were limited to only what was deemed necessary. One respondent suggested that in such situations, ‘The minimum of what must be shared will be shared . . . if it is necessary to share A, B won’t be shared, or if B is shared, well, then A prime will not be [shared].’ Yet another respondent stated, ‘Scientists want to protect their ideas and their data . . . it is our capital.’ In recounting these sorts of interactions, respondents were uniformly negative. How this impacts research outputs is unclear, but certainly the potential for a vibrant, stable, productive collaborative following a mandate was not evident in this sample. Conceivably, there was little will among the participants to navigate the interactions necessary to make partnerships work if the partnership was not desired nor seen as necessary from the outset or during the evolution of the project.
Category 3: Bridging peers Bridging peers are collaboratives characterized by nodes of functionality and similarity at each research site. Participants share a common scientific language and typically are in peer institutions. This type is illustrated by teams in
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two countries independently studying, for example, public attitudes toward genetically modified organisms; relatively modest funding may enable crosscountry comparisons. A champion may be helpful or even instrumental in obtaining such funding, but is not essential to the collaboration. Bridging peers partnerships evidenced additional themes of similarity. The investigators typically received their initial scientific socialization in work that included meaningful interaction in more than one country and often had benefited from sound intergenerational mentoring in these endeavors. These early experiences were not simply ‘travel abroad’ or educational tourism, but instead offered tangible experiences amid the complexity of work conducted within different institutions in different nations. Conceivably, this orientation translated into the propensity to look across national boundaries as their careers progressed. Notably, however, the socialization of scientists and scholars in this type of collaborative was primarily across institutions, not necessarily also across disciplines. Interdisciplinary and multinational socialization of new scientists and scholars is much more complex and may offer one of the grand challenges of the emerging era. Bridging peers partnerships also demonstrate ongoing issues of institutional hierarchy, as these collaboratives functioned best among institutional peers. Specifically, there was evidence that such partnerships could devolve or dissolve when the partnership was not equally valued by both institutions, for example, when one partner had interest in branding itself by affiliation with a more highly regarded institution and the latter institution had motives that were largely ambiguous or didn’t meet the needs of the institution desiring the branding partnership. Among peer institutions, partnerships also became frayed when the research evolved questions or demanded research techniques and expertise that required connection where none existed. The new, needed connection could include another institution or nation or even a fresh scientific language, all of which demands additional funds and time. Thus, such partnerships were stable in comparatively constant environments, but less so in dynamic and rapidly changing situations. It is important to note, however, that the work itself could be dynamic yet within a static partnership environment.
Category 4: Diverse scientific languages and cultures Category 4 collaboratives may be viewed as partnerships characterized by interfaces among institutions for which there are few symmetrical or similar interfaces in the collaborator. Instead, there are numerous, often initially imperceptible, areas of necessary, ‘asymmetrical’ interface. Negotiating these differences leads to far greater interaction costs, including time that was often not ‘budgeted’ in the initial planning of the research. Unlike the heretofore detailed categories in which little interpersonal interaction among participants was required, these partnerships were marked by a multiplicity of necessary interactions.
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Moreover, these collaboratives were often marked by ‘deceptive similarities’, the perception among participants that there was agreement when in fact the evolution of the work made it clear that what appeared to be agreement was actually a similar spoken language for profoundly different things. These interaction costs increased the time to research outputs, often with unexpected delays and complications before data collection even started. One partnership, for example, was exploring health outcomes in nations with not only diverse healthcare and social systems, but also deeply differing values on the very meaning of health and illness. This research stalled due to the multiplicity of perceptions, with resulting disagreement on a basic approach. These challenges were heightened when the institutions were not perceived peers and seldom met face-to-face or through meaningful social interaction networking. This theme echoes Katz, who noted that ‘spatial proximity seems to encourage collaboration’ (Katz and Martin 1997 p. 5), a notion that can be expanded to include conceptual and cultural proximity. Yet even within this category there were marked differences in the complexity of undertaking, depending on the clarity of the construct under study. Health-related studies that looked at physiological outcomes such as laboratory values, for example, were less troubled than those exploring broader, potentially deeply meaningful phenomena such as ‘the good death’. Similarly, the clarity and tangibility of the overall project goal mattered. Both of the above, arguably, may again reflect issues of scientific language and the hierarchy of institutions respectively. Indeed, challenges related to a perceived hierarchy of institutions emerged predominately within this category. As one respondent noted, ‘Sometimes there are different scientific languages, [which] may make it difficult for some of the partners to have the work valued in their own institutions.’ Similarly, another respondent in a prominent research university located in an industrialized nation offered the following observation: ‘It is important that the research culture of your partners is similar, otherwise you may be judged doing weak work at home, yet it is fine for your collaborators.’ These output barriers were not the greatest source of conflict, however. Rather, unlike the first three categories of collaboration in which time to discovery was hastened through association, these partnerships were characterized by concerns about time. Indeed, time was often more important than money, because in these partnerships additional funding could not always create the time and functionality to promote discovery. Illustrative comments from senior faculty and institutional administrators portray these concerns. Notably, these comments were voiced by individuals who see themselves as strong supporters of inter-institutional work: ‘There are significant costs. Time, travel – grants take longer to develop,’ noted one US Associate Dean for Research. These delays have real impacts on faculty, particularly junior faculty in systems with clearly demarcated probationary periods. The risks were understood by at least some senior leaders, as noted in the comments of an executive level administrator who stated, ‘Inexperienced faculty underestimate costs, what this sort of interaction really takes.’
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A mid-level US administrator suggests similar perceptions: ‘These efforts take time and a young faculty member’s productivity might be lower, so for assistant professors it is too scary.’ Yet another, reflecting on the numbers of team individuals that may be necessary for multinational work, states: ‘You don’t get promoted for being part of a team.’ Again, these considerations were voiced by supporters. Conceivably, leaders who are reticent would voice additional concerns. These realities surely shape faculty behavior, particularly since additional fiscal resources do not necessarily translate into time in this sort of partnering. This sentiment was emphatically voiced by a young researcher whose dean was advocating involvement in a China–US environmental partnership. She states: ‘My institution is looking for numbers and impact of publications. If this slows me down, I am not interested.’ Thus, Category 4 reveals several implicit realities shaping the international research fabric. First, the incentive system is broader than the institution or individual champions, even when those champions are in senior positions. Specifically, the politics and reward system of a particular scientific culture will trump the institutional incentive/disincentive structure. Faculty are well aware that their capital depends on research productivity, impact, and other forms of scholarly outputs. They understand that their own professional marketplace spans the globe. This may explain why institutional champions were not found to be particularly effective in enabling such collaboratives. Interestingly, neither was additional funding a consistent enabler. This was largely because money could not always translate into time or enhanced speed to discovery – at least within existing structures and incentive systems. These challenges became even more complex in the next category, collaboratives with human subjects and/or politically/culturally sensitive topics, as follows.
Category 5: Collaboratives with human subjects or politically/culturally/sensitive themes This final category had all the challenges noted in Category 4, with additional weighty and often initially unappreciated barriers. One major source of timeline elongation was differences in perceptions of what constitutes appropriate compliance. In the US, for example, all funded research involving human subjects must undergo review by a body responsible for assuring that subjects’ involvement is completely voluntary, subjects understand the risks, and are free to withdraw at any time without penalty. These Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) assure compliance with what is considered ethical conduct of research, fully supportive of individual rights. Each US university has detailed timelines and protocols, however, the exact forms and timelines are not identical in different US institutions. Moreover, the IRB holds special responsibility for ‘vulnerable populations’ such as children and must assure that coercion to participate, even if subtle, does not exist. Thus,
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research that in any way includes the potential for vulnerability on the part of the participant will receive heightened scrutiny in the US. Moreover, if data were to be gathered in more than one language, the ‘informed consent’ document required by the US IRB must be approved prior to the study and requires translation from English to the native language of the study subjects and then back translation to English by a different translator, to then be compared to the original English version. Such ‘translation/back–translation’ is necessary to assure the IRB that the consent has not been modified in translation, as the potential for clear informed consent is central to their approval to proceed with the research. At the same time, translation/ back translation of consent forms can involve substantial amounts of unanticipated time. Moreover, when the translation involved relatively obscure languages, it is difficult for researchers to find two fluent translators; funding translators was an additional, often unexpected barrier. Arguably, this inherent slowing of discovery may contribute to perceptions of a hierarchy of disciplines and elitism among those whose work, by its very nature, is not impeded by these human-factor complications.
Discussion Research collaboratives vary dramatically in the dimensions of interaction that need to be negotiated and accommodated. The framework heretofore detailed posits that each additional dimension increases interaction costs. Thus, collaborative types can be conceptualized along a trajectory from decreasing institutional risk to increasing individual risk, decreasing stability, and increasing time to research outputs. An additional overlay to the model trajectory offers a simplified dichotomous profile (Figure 5.2). The lower quadrant of the model in Figure 5.2 represents an area of deceptive differences. Although the institutions and partners appear very different – and indeed are located in different nations – they function within a unified package of scientific languages and goals. This area incorporates what Bozeman and Rogers term ‘knowledge value collectives . . . the set of individuals who interact in the demand, production, technical evaluation, and application of scientific and technical knowledge’ (2002, p. 769). The obverse, the upper outer quadrant, represents an area of deceptive similarities. Partners in these categories perceive they are undertaking the same work, with similar goals, processes, and capacities, when indeed this is not and perhaps cannot be the case. Unfortunately, these differences may be unbeknown to them until well into the project. Thus, the complexity of the partnership increases along human factors and complexities of meanings, each of which can offer multiplying distances between the institutions and the individuals within them. Multinational research collaboratives, therefore, differ markedly and very different types of supports, structures, and interactions are necessary for success. At the same time, respondents voiced similar if not identical criteria
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Figure 5.2 Collaboratives: a simplified dichotomy of characteristics
for success. Success was uniformly defined as research impact through the mechanism of publication in respected international journals, research dollars, and to a lesser degree patents, foundation for more research and potential for graduate students and teaching collaboratives. Interestingly, only one respondent explicitly voiced goals such as social good, adoption of the findings to serve humanity, or resolution of the problem originally prompting the research. Presumably, these are implicit in the rationale for discovery. The faintness of this voice among the respondents, however, speaks to the extent to which institutional leaders are immersed in the business of research. Notably, this includes the author, who did not perceive this implication until it was highlighted by one of the participants who attended the initial vetting of the framework. The hierarchy of institutions, disciplines, and methods of inquiry was also manifest in the phenomenon of scientific language. Collaboratives in which there was a shared scientific language, institutional culture, and potential for precise and uniformly agreed upon constructs and project goals had less complexity to negotiate. One mid-level administrator shared a view that was held by at least some; in his view, work in the upper outer quadrant of the framework is not research at all. Rather, this respondent called such inquiry a form of ‘altruism’ or ‘some sort of human service’. It is easy to imagine that young scientists and scholars whose areas of interest fall in this domain encounter tremendous barriers within their own departments, institutions, and among their senior leaders when similar orientations prevail. At the same time, the academy purports to desire interdisciplinary work.
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Intergenerational mentoring: implications for graduate education and novice researchers The Banff Principles on Graduate Education agreed to by the Council of Graduate Schools (US), European University Association, Canadian Association for Graduate Students, Deans and Directors of Graduate Studies (Australia) and the Association of Chinese Graduate Schools in September 2007 enumerate tenets that encourage multinational research collaboratives, for example, ‘Promote high-quality inter-university collaborative programs across national boundaries’ (http://www.cgsnet.org/portals/0/pdf/ mtg_banffprinciples.pdf, retrieved October 1, 2008). Yet, for some types of research the mechanisms by which this is best accomplished is obscure. There are also high stakes for junior faculty in systems with a probationary period, whereby the quantity and impact of research play a substantial role in their potential retention. Thus, if inter-institutional research is valued, outcome expectations should reflect what is possible, by type of collaborative. Many respondents noted that faculty involved in Collaborative Categories 4 and 5 will necessarily have lower productivity due to the effort and attention necessary to initiate and successfully complete a project. This has substantial implications for faculty reward and retention systems not only within institutions, but beyond, given the finding that the culture of the larger scientific community ‘trumps’ institutional culture and local reward systems.
Issues for consideration The findings of this project suggest that research planners should carefully consider the type of collaborative, the partners, and structures and processes necessary for success. Moreover, senior faculty and mentors should be thoughtful in advising junior faculty and graduate students, appreciating risks of time and instability in some collaboratives. As noted in Figure 5.2, collaboratives in Quadrant II lie in the area of deceptive similarities. Researchers planning their venture may not even be aware of the massive differences in their starting points. Thus, additional attention must be given to proposal development. At a minimum, development time should include the following:
• a clear, detailed, and concrete understanding of the goals of each partner, • • • •
reassessed and reaffirmed at regular intervals, not to exceed three months for new partnerships; criteria for success; criteria for abandonment of the project; expectations regarding intellectual property, including a clear delineation of what the concept means to each partner; the meaning and costs – in both time and personnel – of research integrity/compliance;
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• funding to promote the interactions that enable the above as well as the research itself. These foundational efforts extend the time before the perceived beginning of the project, further underscoring time as the fundamental rate limiting factor in some partnerships. In addition, this time clearly has associated monetary costs. Thus, proposal development should consider real costs, inclusive of time and the value of that time. Morahan et al. (2006), for example, found that a collaborative between two US Academic Health Centers demanded one full FTE of staff merely for Institutional Review Board coordination between these two largely similar organizations located in a single nation. It is difficult to fully extrapolate the additional effort needed for coordination among different nations, particularly if different scientific languages and institutional types are involved. Further quantification of exact expenses will be useful, as funders must become cognizant of these costly complexities.
Conclusion Overall, this project reinforces the obvious: collaboratives are not identical. Necessary costs and risks – human and fiscal – vary dramatically. Yet these differences may be largely invisible to those most directly impacted as well as by those judging impact. At the same time, criteria by which impact is judged are surprisingly uniform. The proposed framework is one conceptualization of the ways similarities and differences among research partnerships can be approached, understood, and potentially accommodated to maximize success for both institutions and individuals. As a framework, it may approximate many collaboratives well, and none perfectly. Further investigation is necessary to elucidate nuances as well as experiment with the supports now emerging from social networking applications. The project also raised important questions about the US review, promotion, and tenure process. Probationary faculty who work in innovative areas demanding new scientific languages and partnership are clearly disadvantaged when judged by standards that emerged and are enabled by a uniform scientific language and culture. Although this is pronounced in multinational partnership, it exists even within a single institution. Intra-institutional research incubator sabbaticals in which individuals from disciplines interested in a common theme create unified ground for ongoing work is one strategy currently employed or under consideration by some US universities. Time to tenure and a reassessment of the value of team membership are also necessary to support faculty undertaking novel partnerships.
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Acknowledgements The author greatly appreciates the financial and leave support from the University of Vermont that enabled the American Council on Education Fellowship year, and the support of the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). Gratitude to Katharyn May, PhD, Dean of the College of Nursing at UW, for suggesting the concepts of ‘deceptive similarities’ and ‘deceptive differences’ as employed in this chapter. Many thanks to those who attended the initial vetting of this framework; your insights were invaluable. Gratefulness to Nancy Mathews, PhD, UW’s Director of Accreditation, and Donald H. DeHayes, PhD, Provost, University of Rhode Island, USA for their substantive critique and ongoing interest in this project.
References Bammer, G. (2008) Enhancing research collaborations: three management challenges, Research Policy, 37: 875–87. Boardman, P.C. and Corley, E. (2008) University research centers and the composition of research collaboratives, Research Policy, 37: 900–13. Bozeman, B. and Corley, E. (2004) Scientists’ collaboration strategies: implications for scientific and technical human capital, Research Policy, 33: 599–616. Bozeman, B. and Rogers, J. (2002) A churn model of scientific knowledge value: Internet researchers as a knowledge value collective, Research Policy, 31(5): 769–94. Butcher, J. and Jeffrey, P. (2007) A view from the coal face: UK research student perceptions of successful and unsuccessful collaborative projects, Research Policy, 36: 1239–50. Carey, T., Howard, D., Goldmon, M., Roberson, J., Godley, P. and Ammerman, A. (2005) Developing effective inter-university partnerships and community-based research to address health disparities, Academic Medicine, 80(11): 1039–45. Corley, E., Boardman, P. C. and Bozeman, B. (2006) Design and the management of multi-institutional research collaborations: theoretical implications from two case studies, Research Policy, 35: 975–93. Denrell, J. (2005) Selection bias and the perils of benchmarking, Harvard Business Review, 83(4): 114–21. John, R., Hopper, J., Beck, J. et al. (2004) The breast cancer family registry: an infrastructure for cooperative multinational, interdisciplinary and translational studies of the genetic epidemiology of breast cancer, Breast Cancer Research, 6(4): R375–R389. Katz, J. S. and Martin, B. (1997) What is research collaboration? Research Policy, 26: 1–18. Melin, G. (2000) Pragmatism and self-organization: research collaboration on the individual level, Research Policy, 29: 31–40. Morahan, P. S., Yamagata, H., McDade, S. A., Richman, R., Francis, R. and Odhner, V.C. (2006) New challenges facing interinstitutional social science and educational program evaluation research at academic health centers: a case study from the ELAM program, Academic Medicine, 81(6): 527–34. Parten, M. (1932) Social participation among preschool children, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 27: 243–69.
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Zervos, V. and Siegel D. (2008) Technology, security, and policy implications of future transatlantic partnerships in space: lessons from Galileo, Research Policy, 37: 1630–42.
6 Producing researchers: the changing role of the doctorate Alison Lee and David Boud
Introduction How do researchers become researchers? Most commonly, university researchers have learned how to do research ‘on the job’ and the training ground that supplies a credential for undertaking advanced scholarly research is a doctorate, usually a PhD. So it is important to understand what the PhD is and what it does, in order to make the connection between doctoral candidature, with its period of supervised doctoral research and a thesis, and the practices of research in the contemporary university environment. If the conditions and practices of university research are changing, how does the doctorate need to change to accommodate these developments? The process of becoming an academic researcher through doctoral candidature has often been construed in terms of ‘socialization’ into the cultural norms and practices of disciplinary communities (see e.g. Delamont, Atkinson & Parry 1997; Delamont, Parry & Atkinson 1997; Golde and Walker 2006). Such socialization involves participation in the core activities of the research community and being apprenticed into the ways of doing research that characterize the discipline. Through their extensive research into doctoral education and research, Delamont and her colleagues explored how stability and continuity in scientific and social science disciplines are sustained through socialization processes of doctoral research. They identified the ‘inter-generational transmission of knowledge, skills and assumptions’ (Delamont, Parry & Atkinson 1997, p. 533) within institutional settings of laboratories and research groups. Through large-scale empirical research projects into a range of science and social science disciplines, they identified two key elements of successful socialization for doctoral students. The first of these is critical mass, the availability of strong research groups creating a culture in which full participation can be modelled and practised in a form of cultural apprenticeship. The second, which they term ‘pedagogic continuity’, refers to the actual practices of enculturation. While these vary in mode and content across
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different disciplines, they involve the dynamics of the inter-generational transmission of knowledge, skills and attitudes referred to by (Delamont, Parry & Atkinson 1997, p. 533). In the context of the UK, they were able to show how doctoral supervisors within different disciplines tended to pass down their own learning, study and research practices to their students, having inherited them from their own supervisors. A decade on from that research, several important things have changed. Modes of knowledge production have shifted and expanded further in the direction of inter- and trans-disciplinarity (see e.g. Nowotny et al. 2001). New forms of theorization construe the processes of doctoral work in terms of the formation of researchers as ‘subjects’ within discourses and practices of doctoral research and supervision (Grant 2008; Lee and Green 2009). These shifts open spaces for thinking more broadly about the relationships between knowledge, practice and subjectivity. At the same time as these developments, there have been direct interventions in research policy by national governments that have effectively shifted emphasis on the governance of doctoral degrees in the direction of ‘research training’. Global shifts in economic and research policy focus on the doctorate as a kind of advanced training for knowledge production in a global knowledge economy. This goes further than previous policy emphases, beyond producing the next generation of academic researchers into the creation of those who will drive innovation throughout the economy, outside universities. Not only is there increased competition for knowledge worldwide but also for researchers; research training has had to expand to build portability and flexibility into doctoral awards. It is important for university research to be global as never before and hence for research training to be more visible, efficient and accountable. In advanced economies such as Australia, Europe and the US, aging populations of academic researchers exacerbate the pressures to produce new generations of researchers who meet these intensifying needs. This shift in the focus of policy moves us on from an overwhelming emphasis on the product of the period of doctoral work – a contribution to the production of knowledge through an original thesis – to a much greater concern for the production of a researcher: someone capable of conducting independent research after graduation. It also moves from disciplinary reproduction to a set of new attributes, for transdisciplinary, cross-sectoral and entrepreneurial activity beyond that traditionally governed by the academy. This shift acknowledges and contributes to the growing dispersal of research activity. Indeed, worldwide now, fewer than half of all doctoral graduates take up careers as university researchers (Gilbert 2009). The shift from a prime emphasis on the outcome of research to the educative work of producing the researcher has meant a shift in the discourse of the doctorate from postgraduate research to doctoral education (Bond and Lee 2009). The emphasis on the educative dimensions leads to a concern to specify the capabilities and attributes of the independent researcher in particular disciplines or fields, together with a set of so-called ‘generic’
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attributes for doctoral graduates. No longer is it sufficient to learn ‘on the job’ how to do research; as well, new skills and capabilities are required for researchers to function in these changing international and organizational environments, including ones where inter- and trans-disciplinary research teams are required to address complex global problems. As well as this focus on the doctoral stage of researcher development, we have seen attention on research training turn to the post-doctoral stage of a research career, particularly in the SET (science and technology) disciplines, whether that be through postdoctoral fellowships or ‘early career researcher’ policies within universities. The doctorate is no longer the only, or the final, stage in research training, it seems. This chapter addresses a set of questions that particularly arise for the practice of the doctorate in producing researchers following these shifts in policy emphasis. These are: what are the affordances that provide effective training and the opportunity to learn, experience and do research? How do the traditional practices and experiences of a doctoral candidature relate to the dominant and emergent conditions of contemporary university research? How are they changing and not changing? Who is responsible for this? The practices of the doctorate vary in significant ways across the disciplines, but traditionally, responsibility for a doctoral student’s learning has rested primarily with a single supervisor. A more recent focus has been directed to provision of research environments and cultures that are more explicitly conducive to learning the skills, know-how, dispositions and relationships characteristic of contemporary research. This typically involves interactions with multiple parties and a less exclusive focus on the individual supervisor. Doctoral research is also being more closely tied to research projects and to centres of research concentration, even in disciplines where this has not previously been the case. These changes draw attention to the need for a shift from a private and unarticulated space to a public sphere of discourse about research training and doctoral work. As Jean Chambaz (2008, p. 10), Chair of the Steering Committee, Council for Doctoral Education of the European University Association, summarizes it: Doctoral education definitely needs structure to achieve a critical mass. It’s no longer possible to develop the one-to-one relationship between the student and the professor. We really need to help students develop their knowledge and their experience through training by research to achieve in doctoral programs a critical mass of research, since research, even in humanities, is quite a collective process. Research itself becomes ‘pedagogical’, a term we take to refer to a deliberate focus on the educative dimension of research activity, involving doctoral students, and also post-doctoral and early career researchers. Here we suggest that, in addition to a kind of ‘on the job training’, research activity needs to become explicitly a site and an opportunity for learning and development. In particular, we draw on a decade and a half of research into the doctorate, beginning with the groundbreaking work of Cullen et al. (1994), that
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identifies doctoral education as a ‘collective responsibility’ (Lawson 2008, p. 28). The relationships doctoral students have with their student peers, with co-researchers and with international colleagues in their field become part of a distributed network of learning and practice. Following Delamont, Atkinson and Parry (1997a), we see, in addition to ‘critical mass’, the importance also of more explicit attention to the ‘pedagogic continuity’ of a community of research: an explicit passing on from one generation of researchers to another of key knowledges, skills and dispositions at the base of a scholarly discipline or inter-disciplinary or professional research field. What this has meant is that doctoral education has had to become increasingly structured, not only in order to foster timely completion but also to provide explicit attention to the development of traditional disciplinary as well as trans-disciplinary, project management, communicative and entrepreneurial capabilities. Chambaz (2008, p. 10) suggests further that this needs to be placed within the context of a critical mass of research activity: This structure could take any form; it doesn’t matter as long as the structure gives the critical mass. It could be doctoral programs, doctoral or research schools or these classical graduate schools. And they should be at the high institutional level linked tightly to universities. In educational terms this has meant the development of more structured curricula (Gilbert 2009). What is important here is that the curriculum elements are not extra courses or ‘add-ons’ to business as usual, or ‘normal science’. Rather, they take both the traditional and the new practices of research cultures as elements for structuring activities that develop capabilities and outcomes in a more explicit way, whether these are research, publications during and after candidature, applications for post-doctoral or other fellowships, etc. In this sense, the idea of ‘pedagogic continuity’ put forward by Delamont and her colleagues needs to be revisited and re-cast to take up the development of the diversity of capabilities identified. In particular, the idea of ‘collective responsibility’ for doctoral education needs elaboration in terms of who is responsible and for what. We will discuss this point in terms of the idea of distributed practices in doctoral education, and consider its implication for the formation of academic researchers, in the latter part of this chapter. To begin to explore these matters, we present two brief case studies of change in the educational work of the doctorate, using them to develop the argument that it is no longer sufficient to learn how to do research or to become researchers on the job by doing it. With the possible exception of truly outstanding candidates, older, implicit modes of affording pedagogical continuity can limit the options and the horizons of the researcher subject that is produced through these practices. Rather, what is needed is the explicit development of high-order cognitive and strategic capability and experience. This is not a matter of ‘adding more stuff’, for example, more methods courses, into an already crowded and rushed experience, but it does need to ensure that the demands on students to take on mundane
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research assistant work that occurs in some contexts need to be restrained to allow the fulfilment of these other expectations.
Case study 1 producing scientists How are PhD researchers produced in the laboratory sciences? The first case study is based on an account given by Pearson et al. (2009) of an investigation of PhD research in the biomedical sciences in a large research-intensive Australian university. The authors of this study interviewed recent doctoral graduates and supervisors to identify the kinds of activity PhD students undertook to produce what they referred to as ‘the scientific mindset’. In the disciplines studied in this inquiry – neuroscience, immunology, biochemistry and molecular biology – students work alongside each other with post-doctoral researchers and various other personnel in a setting in which all are engaged in research activity in related areas. While much day-to-day activity is spent ‘at the bench’ undertaking various kinds of experimental work, there is considerable incidental interactions with other researchers and participation in organized activities that are part of the normal business of doing science. These include attending seminars, discussing the design of studies, procedures and results and the preparation of research papers, the latter often as one of a larger group of authors. Becoming a researcher in these circumstances occurs through hands-on doing of particular aspects of research, and participating, sometimes on the periphery, in other aspects of the overall research enterprise. Some of the latter occurs anyway, whether or not the student is present. Seminars continue and publication takes place because that is what scientists do. Pearson, et al. (2009) draw attention to activities that their interviewees – recent doctoral graduates working as post-doctoral fellows or early career academics – regarded as important in their own development. They include activities they describe as ‘thinking like an independent scientist’ in which they were challenged with making sense of data, developing a coherent argument and drawing conclusions, and ‘critiquing analysis’ in which a supervisor would go through papers that the student had identified in order to discuss the data, interpretations and conclusions, consider alternative designs and ways to test hypotheses. In the latter case students were also involved in critiquing papers the supervisor had received for review, discussing differences between supervisor and student critiques. A common practice in science that was regarded as important for the interviewees in this study was participation in journal clubs. These are regular sessions in which small groups of researchers and students meet to discuss specific journal articles. They are often intense, involving sessions in which members explore in depth a given publication. One interviewee describes how, ‘I was able to listen to the professionals create hypotheses, interpret data, and then be critiqued for this interpretation by others. In particular, during journal club, I was able to see people define the question, and the way
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in which they are testing it.’ This person went on to point out that in her first journal club, she hardly spoke, but subsequently she became involved with considerable animation. It is interesting to note that all these activities can be regarded as the normal doings of science and are akin to what research scientists engage in as part of their everyday professional lives. There is acknowledgement here that students are novices and need to be brought in to the ways of thinking and forms of interpretation, but this ‘bringing in’ takes the form of the kinds of interaction that commonly occur in the discipline: how to think about problems, the critique of published work, how to make an argument, and so on. Even those activities that might be thought of as the most educationally contrived – the seminar or the journal club – have an obvious validity in the work of science. They are not seen as the adding of coursework or extra educational requirements. However, the examples regarded positively by respondents were not simply those in which they as students joined in research as peripheral participants. There was an active engagement by supervisors and others in what we can see as a more explicit kind of pedagogical agenda. They wanted the students to learn how to think like a scientist, they wanted them to know how to justify the drawing of conclusions from data. And to this end they engaged in deliberate educational interventions to develop the capacity of the students. This is not a laissez-faire approach, but a de facto pedagogy rooted in disciplinary values and ways of operating. What may sometimes be missing or undeveloped in this, though, is an explicitness of intention, an agreement of purpose and a clear sense of what has been achieved. A feature of the experience of these scientists was the way in which they were participants in seminars and clubs, even though they might not at first have much to contribute. It was accepted that at the start they may not offer much, but it was important for them to be in these regular forums so they saw how researchers thought and operated. It is a small step from the passive or unreflective pedagogy that these examples represent to a consciousness that the research environment provides opportunities for explicitly educational work. This is not educational work that is separate and added on to research work, but an active utilization of the affordances of the situation, an integrated pedagogy that sits intimately alongside the doing of science. This kind of activity cannot be readily scheduled in the ways courses or workshops can be organized; it is partly opportunistic and partly builds on the features of research work that in the process are made explicit. These practices are distributed in the sense that they not only belong in the domain of supervision, but also involve other parties – more experienced researchers and other research students. The process of increasing involvement of students in these wider settings in the life of laboratories can be thought of as part of the process of ‘becoming a peer’ that we have used to characterize the path of a research student becoming a full member of the research community (Boud and Lee 2005). They start by being allowed to occupy the same spaces as community
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members, they engage in events at first as an observer, then as an active participant, and through this are coached by supervisors in the ways of research and being accepted within the research community.
Case study 2: cross-disciplinary doctoral publication programmes The second case study examines the growing pressure to publish within the scope and timeframe of the doctorate. Scholarly publication is the major outcome of university research, often the only public outcome. How are doctoral students and graduates to be best prepared to participate in the peer review process through which research is disseminated and legitimized? This case study is based on several recent studies of doctoral publication, which drew on interview, focus group and participant observation data from a range of science and social science disciplines, including physics, biology, ecology, environmental studies and education in two large metropolitan Australian universities (Kamler 2008; Lee and Kamler 2008). A persistent conception of research in many disciplines is that it consists of activity – fieldwork, lab work – which is then ‘written up’. This is a ‘before and after’ conception of writing and publication, where often the skills, practices and relationships required for successful publication remain untaught. At the same time, publication rates from doctoral research have traditionally been low, across the disciplines, albeit with differential patterns (McGrail et al. 2006). This situation compounds a more generally low publication rate from academics within universities, even while some academic researchers publish prolifically. So the laissez-faire approach to this core aspect of research has not worked well in many respects. Embedding writing for publication into the normal business of designing and conducting doctoral research becomes a strategy for addressing this issue. Lee and Kamler (2008) illustrate pedagogical work within universities that explicitly engages with students in different disciplines to integrate and embed writing for publication into the provision of a curriculum for doctoral research. Three such strategies are: (1) writing for publication groups; (2) skilled writing- and publication-focused supervision pedagogy; and (3) structured and supported co-authorship. First, establishing groups for ‘writing for publication’ is a strategy that can be embedded into the programme of doctoral work at different stages in candidature in any discipline. Students attend a structured, facilitated group where they learn to critique drafts of each other’s articles and develop skills of peer review, as part of a required activity. In the example developed in Lee and Kamler, a group of final-year doctoral students in education develop articles from their dissertation chapters, learning the different rhetorical strategies needed for journal audiences. This is as much a matter of building scholarly confidence and authority as it is of the technicalities of writing. These groups increase productivity in terms of publication
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but also knowledge and capability about writing and publication. While Lee and Kamler’s work is primarily undertaken within social science disciplines, Aitchison (2009) has worked in multi-disciplinary groups of doctoral students in a university-wide programme of writing with sustained success in terms of completion and publication outcomes. A second strategy involves explicit pedagogical work on writing in the one-to-one space of supervision. Lee and Kamler (2008) explain how one supervisor and a student go through the reviewers’ comments from an article submitted by the student. This is a critical exercise of interpretation and response strategy for the student, but it also involves emotional mentoring, dealing with rejection and criticism. We know from recent research that most supervisors are unskilled in relation to this developmental work (Paré et al. 2009), so there is a need to build structured activities that draw on the expertise of colleagues, both within and external to the research group, familiar with supporting the publication process. A third strategy, co-authoring, is discussed as an opportunity for modelling and scaffolding scholarly writing. Co-authoring with supervisors and research teams is a common practice in SET disciplines – normal business, in fact – though it remains counter-cultural in others. In Kamler’s (2008) study, students in both science and education saw this co-authorship as playing a significant role in helping them write for publication. Six participating science graduates published 13 articles in international refereed publications prior to graduation, all co-authored with supervisors. In contrast, only two of the six education graduates published in high-profile international journals. Significantly, these two articles were also the only two co-authored texts in the education sample. While the sample size in this study is very small, its findings are striking in their contrast across the two disciplinary areas, with the education publication rates being much lower. The struggle and anxiety experienced by students, in particular the stresses of critical peer review, are a strong feature of the student experience Kamler reports. One of her graduate participants, an ecology graduate, says: It’s, you know, sort of putting yourself out there in front of your peers to be examined, not torn down, but you’re being critically reviewed, so, yes, there is some sort of angst involved in that. Even though the thesis goes to examiners, the thesis itself tends to sit and goes to dust. This is the real public face of the thesis. This is what people judge you on because when you read it, you can generally tell if it’s someone’s thesis work. That’s where you’re first introduced to the rest of your peers. So, yeah, there’s that sort of anxiety there. (cited in Kamler 2008, p. 290) For this student, it is in the public text, more than his thesis, where his scholarly identity and scholarship are on display. To do this is risky, but it is a risk necessary for the production of the successful published researcher. In other examples, students may co-author with each other or other researchers. Of course there is no guarantee that these experiences are pedagogical in
104 The politics and culture of university research the sense that we are developing here, but practices of co-authorship offer a rich potential for modelling and explicit learning, about the rhetorical conventions of scholarly communities, as well as the professional practices of peer review and editorship. These examples all require a structured programme of facilitated educative work. Each is embedded into an organized curriculum across the stages of candidature, including a programme of professional development for supervisors, to acquire and practise the skills and capabilities to do this developmental work. Pedagogic continuity is being established through both explicit modelling and intense co-participation through co-authoring. These examples indicate the critical importance of support for publication during doctoral candidature in terms of ensuring productivity from the doctorate and beyond. Such a finding is supported by research into research productivity. Green, Hutchison and Sra (1992) studied low publication rates from doctoral research in social work and concluded that the most important predictor of future scholarly productivity was success in publishing results from dissertations, and that publishing productivity could be stimulated during doctoral education. The connection between pedagogical support for publishing and increased productivity of researchers, was further confirmed through two international surveys by Dinham and Scott (2001). In these studies, encouragement from supervisors was one important aspect of proceeding to publication, and institutional support was the other. Students who attended universities with coherent policies encouraging postgraduate publication published more, both as students and graduates. Without policy support, according to Dinham and Scott’s research, publication was a hit-and-miss affair.
Practical and strategic tensions in doctoral education What are we to make of these case studies in changing practices in producing researchers? There is a range of issues at stake here. One way to put this is to look at a conceptual divide between thinking of the doctorate primarily in terms of ‘research’ as the conceptual organizer to thinking of it in terms of ‘research education’. This shift represents a move from viewing the doctorate principally as part of the work of doing research to conceiving it explicitly as a mechanism for forming the researcher. It is a shift from viewing doctoral work in terms of the externalities of what is produced to the production of the person who researches. This educational view is needed when the successful doctoral graduate is understood as not just joining a defined disciplinary community of research practitioners but making a wider contribution to the research enterprise which may involve different modes of knowledge production and research technique from those into which they were inducted. Making
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doctoral work explicitly educational opens up a greater range of possibilities to the graduate, but may make them less of an immediately prolific contributor to a given sub-field. Thus there can be resistance to this move by those who want to staff their own laboratories and who see their work as running research production facilities. However, such a move ironically opens the way for potentially greater research outputs in areas that embrace the need for a broader doctoral education. A useful way of construing the tensions between an emphasis on producing research and one on producing researchers is in terms of a ‘thin’ and a ‘thick’ or ‘rich’ intellectual environment and a consequential set of affordances for becoming a researcher. Through providing a curriculum that acknowledges the capabilities and key elements in the formation of a researcher, and that builds on the practices of doing research, both the researcher and the capacity for further research in the environment are strengthened. Within a rich intellectual environment there will be multiple practices shaping the researcher involving different players, rather than a sole emphasis on a student–supervisor relationship. The case studies identify a range of what can be termed distributed practices that aid the formation of the researcher. These practices arguably create spaces for explicit enculturation, at the same time as offering pedagogical opportunities for innovation and change. While some of these take place within the supervisory relationship, many others occur in different configurations. In the first case study there is the seminar with experienced researchers and often external experts and the journal club with a variety of researchers and other research students. In these, the supervisor may be one of a number of contributors or may be absent altogether. In the second, the writing group typically includes student peers, some of whom may be further advanced in writing for publication than others, and includes experienced writers who foster the reading and interactions. Co-authorship has the potential to include a range of participants, including supervisors, research teams and student peers. We can see in these configurations a collective responsibility for development that resides in the research community rather than simply with the person designated as supervisor. However, such collective responsibility and the affordances that distributed practices create do not necessarily influence all doctoral candidates. We see in the context of Pearson et al.’s (2009) account how the focus is on the pedagogical work these practices need to do in development of capabilities and ‘mindsets’, as distinct from the purely pragmatic work of advancing the project. There could be different sets of practices that attach to these things, e.g. the journal club might or might not be a site of productive learning for doctoral students, depending on the educative intent and the way it is conducted. There is a need for the notion of a doctoral curriculum and pedagogical practices associated with it to ensure that what occurs for the most pro-active students who take up all the possible opportunities is available for others, and is seen as a legitimate part of the formation of researchers.
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A re-balancing of the elements of doctoral work, between the doing of research and the learning about conventions and assumptions as well as trends and changes, serves to reshape as well as to re-emphasize the importance of pedagogic continuity as an explicit strategy for inducting doctoral students into the norms and assumptions, knowledge and skills of research domains. It also raises questions about discontinuity: the need to understand research education for a changing research world. Business as usual is no longer a sufficient resource for such education. One major rationale for the pedagogization of research training is the need to scale up and create efficiencies in the training of researchers, given the change agendas outlined above. Much doctoral study takes place in contexts in which there is not a large laboratory in which students benefit from collaboration with a wide range of post docs and other researchers in a rich and stimulating environment that is posited as the ideal for the ‘production’ model. There is a widespread recognition in policy and scholarship that doctoral candidates, as apprentice researchers, need more than either individual supervision (as in the human sciences) or practical team membership (in laboratory sciences). There has been an opening out of a discourse of research education that incorporates an explicit set of attributes and outcomes required for a successful career as a researcher, whether that is in universities or other organizations. At the same time, there is an accompanying recognition of the need for more formal structures, networks and a wider array of practices involved in achieving these outcomes. In fortuitous circumstances these may be present without planning, but in most places, considerable effort is required to bring them about.
Conclusion The practices of doctoral education have traditionally been implicit and often private, in the sense that the actual work of supervision was invisible and unaccountable. It was in one form or another a kind of ‘on-the-job’ training, a particular kind of informal apprenticeship. Whether that meant that the work of doctoral research involved being an ‘extra pair of hands’ in a laboratory-based research team, or the peripheral participation and learning and by watching that characterized the implicit apprenticeships of other disciplines, this kind of unspoken and unacknowledged practice did not necessarily always provide experience in the kinds of attributes required for a changing research environment. It arguably did not produce the kind of knowing ‘subject’ that is required for a changing research world. New kinds of research require different kinds of researchers, ones who can be entrepreneurial, inter-disciplinary, and skilled in negotiation and project management as well as in the traditional protocols of a discipline. Today’s university environment is one in which a more explicit focus on ‘research training’ positions doctoral education in a sequence of moves towards full membership of research communities. The increasing emphasis
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on the post-doctoral and ‘early career’ phases of career development as a researcher is partly in response to the mobilization of the student to take up opportunities in supervisory relationships to turn naturally occurring research processes to this end, and those responsible for programmes of development to embed them in the normal work of research. Clearly great care needs to be taken in developing doctoral curricula that are conducive to the development of sustainable as well as innovative and adaptable research cultures. The need for both critical mass and pedagogic continuity was well made by Delamont, et al. (1997a). More recently, as noted earlier, Chambaz (2008) locates responsibility for providing more structured education at the highest level of the university. This involves focusing on the key features of developing the capabilities of a researcher. At the same time, in order to do this effectively, the accretions of other models may need to be pared back. Producing the researcher now requires a conscious focus on what is being produced and how the opportunities of a functioning research community can be utilized to this end. It requires both a view of the outcomes required – specific and generic – and how programmes can be structured to achieve these. This needs to lead to increasingly sophisticated planning which coordinates players and opportunities to the end of researcher formation.
References Aitchison, C. (2009) Research writing groups and successful thesis writing, in J. Higgs, D. Horsfall and S. Grace (eds) Writing Qualitative Research in Practice, 253–63. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Boud, D. and Lee, A. (2005) ‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education, Studies in Higher Education, 30(5): 501–16. Boud, D. and Lee, A. (eds) (2009) Changing Practices of Doctoral Education. London: Routledge. Chambaz, J. (2008) Reforming doctorate education in Europe: a response to global challenges, in M. Kiley and G. Mullins (eds) Research Education in the New Global Environment, Proceedings of the Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference (pp. 14–21). Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Cullen, D., Pearson, M., Saha, L. J. and Spear, R. H. (1994) Establishing Effective PhD Supervision. Canberra, ACT: Australian Government Publishing Service. Delamont, S., Atkinson, P. and Parry, O. (1997a) Critical mass and doctoral research: reflections on the Harris report, Studies in Higher Education, 22(3): 319–31. Delamont, S., Parry, O. and Atkinson, P. (1997b) Critical mass and pedagogic continuity: studies in academic habitus, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 18(4): 533–49. Dinham, S. and Scott, C. (2001) The experience of disseminating the results of doctoral research, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 25(1): 45–55. Gilbert, R. (2009) The doctorate as curriculum: a perspective on goals and outcomes of doctoral education, in D. Boud and A. Lee (eds) Changing Practices of Doctoral Education (pp. 54–68). London: Routledge. Golde, C. M. and Walker, G. E. (2006) Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
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Grant, B. (2008) Agonistic struggle: master/slave dialogues in humanities supervision, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 7(1): 9–27. Green, R., Hutchison, E. and Sra, B. (1992) Evaluating scholarly performance: the productivity of graduates of social work doctoral programs, Social Services Review, 441–66. Kamler, B. (2008) Rethinking doctoral publication practices: writing from and beyond the thesis, Studies in Higher Education, 33(3): 283–29. Lawson, A. (2008) Summing up the 2008 QPR Conference, in M. Kiley and G. Mullins (eds) Research Education in the New Global Environment, Proceedings of 6th Quality in Postgraduate Research Conference, Adelaide, 17–18 April, pp. 28–31. Lee, A. and Green, B. (2009) Supervision as metaphor, Studies in Higher Education, 34(6): 615–30. Lee, A. and Kamler, B. (2008) Bringing pedagogy to doctoral publishing, Teaching in Higher Education, 13(5): 511–23. McGrail, M., Rickard, C. and Jones, R. (2006) Publish or perish: a systematic review of interventions to increase academic publication rates, Higher Education Research and Development, 25(1): 19–35. Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Paré, A., Starke-Meyerring, D. and McAlpine, L. (2009) The dissertation as multi-genre: many readers, many readings, in C. Bazerman, D. Figueiredo and A. Bonini (eds) Genre in a Changing World. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse. Pearson, M., Cowan, A. and Liston. A. (2009) PhD education in science: producing the scientific mindset in biomedical sciences, in D. Boud and A. Lee (eds) Changing Practices in Doctoral Education (pp. 100–12). London: Routledge.
Part II Researcher experiences and identities
So far this book has focused attention on investigations of the changing policy context of academic research and some of its key influences. Part I explored debates about government policy and university research, issues concerned with the relationship of research to governmental control, how research is measured and how researchers are responding to globalization. Notions of academic communities have been explored both through an investigation of citation practices and in terms of multinational research collaborations. In short, the focus has been on studies that have investigated aspects of the ways in which research as a social system functions. In this section, we turn our attention to work that has explored how people in universities think about and make sense of academic research, how they position themselves in relation to it and how they experience the tensions and contradictions thrown up by the specific contexts and situations in which they find themselves. So while in Part I our focus was on studies that attempt to understand what is the case, what Marton (1981) called a first order perspective, our focus here is on studies that aim to understand the different ways in which people think about or experience what is the case, Marton’s second order perspective. How people think about research is a relatively new but burgeoning field of study. Since 2000 an increasing number of investigations have utilized both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the views of a range of people: senior and junior academics, research degree supervisors, and undergraduate and postgraduate students. Phenomenographic approaches, grounded theory and survey research represent characteristic methodologies for this work and these are presented and discussed here to varying extents. Like the chapters in Part I, the selection of studies here is presented as illustrative of a field of investigation. We are not seeking to provide an indication of the scope of the field, nor do we wish to suggest that the chapters typify the range of methodological approaches now being used to examine how people in universities think about research. In choosing work
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to present, we wanted to illustrate a range of studies in terms of their generation in different countries, and we wanted to provide work which was illustrative of different methodologies. Above all, our chapters explore the ideas of researchers with different roles and orientations. So in Part II, Liudvika Leisˇyte˙ , Jürgen Enders and Harry de Boer explore the experiences of disciplinary academics as they respond to research policy in the Netherlands; Catherine Manathunga explores the experiences of Australian interdisciplinary researchers; Christine Asmar, Ocean Mercier and Susan Page examine the perceptions of Indigenous researchers; Margaret Kiley explores the ways in which postgraduate supervisors and research higher degree students think about research; Mari Murtonen and Erno Lehtinen examine how undergraduate students think about learning about research; and Angela Brew and David Boud explore the differences in orientations of academics who are productive in research and those who are not. As soon as we enter into work which investigates how people think about a particular phenomenon, questions about how these views relate to reality (how, for example, academics’ views relate to university structures and systems), the nature and status of what people believe to be that reality and, in particular, the possibility, nature or existence of any kind of causal imperative become problematic. While a number of studies discussed in the literature have explored how academics, academic administrators, postgraduates and undergraduates think about research, we take the view that what people think research is, has to be seen in the context of the kinds of socio-political and socio-cultural conditions discussed in Part I and the consequent institutional agendas and pressures, roles and responsibilities. One way of viewing this is in terms of Bourdieu’s (1988) concept of the ‘habitus’ which suggests that people in a given society have a set of underlying dispositions and tastes which are shared by other members of that society and provide a backcloth to how people respond. According to this view, what the authors of the chapters in Part II could be viewed as doing is surfacing these underlying views and assumptions. An alternative approach would view people’s responses as indicative of the ways in which a variety of discourses are negotiated in a rhetorical space which has a somewhat more tenuous relationship to the structures in which people are located. Indeed, the very structures themselves, from this standpoint, are viewed as a set of interrelated and kaleidoscopic discourses. In investigating the lived experiences of academics as researchers, a key aim in the work presented in Part II is to better understand how people respond to and make sense of the socio-political conditions including institutional agendas and pressures. Underlying this work is the conviction that people respond to the structures and situations in which they find themselves in a variety of different ways; that the contexts provide a range of possible ways of responding but do not determine how people do actually respond. Chapters in Part II explore ways in which people in universities experience research in the face of the complex socio-political realities of university life and how they reconcile their individual competing priorities.
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Balancing institutional and individual priorities In the context of changing policy and priorities for research examined in Part I, a key concern is how far academics are constrained in pursuing particular research topics and in choosing their own or externally defined objectives; in other words, who is setting the research agenda for particular academics and how they are experiencing possible constraints. In Chapter 1 Margaret Thornton suggested that neo-liberalism was constraining academics in such a way that academic autonomy was under threat. There appears to be no doubt that the changing nature of higher education has challenged academic autonomy. A number of studies have already shown the nature of academic freedom and autonomy to be complex and contestable in the current policy context. Work in Part II explores different ways in which academics are responding. So as we see in Chapter 7, Liudvika Leisˇyte˙ , Jürgen Enders, and Harry de Boer, from their interviews with Dutch biotechnology and medieval history research centres, found a mixed picture emerged where, on the one hand, the importance of academics’ reputation within the academic community was underscored, but, on the other, externally determined rules, including a research agenda partially set from outside the university, increasingly was gaining ground in research practice. So balancing the demands of different stakeholder audiences is now a daily reality for academics in the Netherlands. The chapter shows how academics reorient their work towards new areas and types of research conditioned by the new circumstances, while balancing this with their own academic preferences and their usual research practices to ensure they build credibility within the academic community. A number of other chapters suggest different ways in which academics make choices that balance different and sometimes conflicting priorities. In Chapter 3, Malcolm Tight suggested that academics can be isolated because they need to carve out for themselves a field of investigation to which they can make an important contribution. He argued that this is rarely a straightforward matter of building on a single tradition or line of investigation, particularly in the social sciences. Betty Rambur in Chapter 5 highlighted the ways in which opting for particular types of collaboration can damage the chances of an academic carving out a unique area of investigation for which they can become known. So the choice of research topic and whether this is carried out singly or in a group has consequences for the career progression of the individual. In Chapter 8, Catherine Manathunga takes this a step further. Using postcolonial theories of liminality, transculturation and unhomeliness (Bhabha 1994; Hall 1996), she investigates how interdisciplinary researchers construct their academic identities. Drawing upon interview data with interdisciplinary researchers at an Australian university, the chapter explores the complex ways in which these academics interpret interdisciplinary research. Again there are costs within a context that values a focus on narrowly defined
112 Researcher experiences and identities researcher expertise and reputation. However, the chapter sheds new light on the working habits of interdisciplinary researchers, generating new understandings of the dimensions of interdisciplinary researcher identities. While we make no assumptions about the relations between academic identity and the structures (institutional and discursive) which make those identities possible, we recognize that the notion of identity is a complex one. Identity is now extensively written about but has become a fundamentally contested concept. As an evolving and relational concept, one that is continuously being shaped and shaping itself, through circumstance, context and ‘intersecting and sometimes antagonistic practices’ (Chappell et al. 2003, p. 28), the processes that characterize the formation of identity need to allow for the ‘complexities and ambiguities of experiences’ (Henkel 2000, p. 14). Thus researcher identities are positions that are taken up. They articulate specific power relations (Von Busekist 2004) and express forms of belonging, connection, dissonance, attachment and resistance. We acknowledge that academics conceptualize their identities as researchers in different ways at different points in their careers. What academics say about their identities as researchers; who they are and how they are formed, provides important knowledge about the university itself. As the university changes, academics’ identities become refashioned. So chapters in Part II build on the little work that has examined how academics interpret and respond in constructing identities that make sense to them (e.g. Barnett and Di Napoli 2008). So we see, for example, in Chapter 9 the ways in which Indigenous academics negotiate their identity as researchers. The concept of unhomeliness that Catherine Manathunga discusses in Chapter 8, is well exemplified in the case of the researcher identity of Indigenous academics in universities. These academics value research for its contribution to their careers, disciplines, and above all the emancipation of their communities (Rigney 1999). Yet historically, as Christine Asmar, Ocean Mercier and Sue Page suggest, the relationship of Indigenous people to academic research has been an uneasy one. Indigenous academic staff surveyed in Australia and New Zealand reported a high level of research activity. However, Indigenous research outputs are not always recognized in contexts where research productivity is narrowly defined. Further, there are some systemic barriers, for example, when there is a requirement for Indigenous researchers to complete research degrees and develop research culture, while at the same time being required to take on senior roles which take time away from research. In addition, for Indigenous Australian and Ma¯ ori respondents in their study other issues are equally pressing. Commitments to community are experienced as an almost inexorable force, as are the particular needs of Indigenous students. Added to this are demands for instant expertise on all things Indigenous across their institutions.
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Becoming a researcher Surprisingly little has been published that critically examines the formation of academic researchers. Studies of academic formation have typically asked a range of normative questions, for example, about the appropriate way to ‘develop’ academics in in-service courses (e.g. graduate certificates in teaching) (Land 2001); about the appropriate form of the doctorate, i.e. whether it should include a teaching component (Park 2004); and about its adequacy as a preparation for professional life as an academic (Golde et al. 2006). There is much work to be done to understand the experiences of postgraduate and undergraduate students and, importantly, academics who are learning to be researchers and supervisors (Boud and Lee 2009). In the complex socio-political context explored in Part I, what are some of the challenges in growing the next generation of researchers? How do people develop as researchers? A key concern in Part II is to explore work that examines the experiences of researchers in formation. Pearson and Brew (2002) suggest that research higher degree supervisors need to be open to exploring different ideas about research and they argue for the need for critical reflection on research practice as a basis for good supervision. In Chapter 10 Margaret Kiley reports on a study that demonstrates that research higher degree students and supervisors can have very different ideas about research. This suggests that whatever views of research held by each, these need to be negotiated in the context of the supervisory relationship. If research education is to produce researchers and not just research as argued by Alison Lee and David Boud in Chapter 6, then developing research students’ ideas not just about research methodologies and practices, but also of the socio-political and socio-cultural contexts of research is important. Margaret Kiley suggests that research higher degree students change their ideas about what research is over time in the course of their candidature. She highlights discrepancies between students’ views and those of supervisors and suggests the need for dialogue to move students forward in their understanding of the nature of research, and the need to challenge supervisors’ views about how students are thinking of research. Issues in relation to becoming a researcher as a student are even more acute in the undergraduate context. Engaging undergraduate students in research provides students with a meaningful higher education which develops important graduate attributes and prepares them for a twenty-firstcentury world of work in which knowing how to inquire and how to generate and critically evaluate knowledge is of increasing importance. It develops students’ capacity to solve a range of unforeseen problems, enables them to cope with the ambiguity and complexity of today’s society (Seymour et al. 2004), and importantly, begins to prepare them for a career as a researcher. Although undergraduates appear to value the fact that academics are engaged in research (see, for example, Breen and Lindsay 1999; Jenkins et al. 1998), some scholars have noted among students negative attitudes towards the research of their teachers due to their lack of availability, undue
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influence of staff research in the curriculum, and feelings of being excluded from the research culture ( Jenkins et al. 1998; Zamorski 2002; Healey 2005). These views influence and are influenced by students’ perceptions of what research is, and not surprisingly, there are disciplinary differences because students’ ideas are swayed by the visibility or lack of visibility of research and this varies across departments (Robertson and Blackler 2006). In Chapter 11, Mari Murtonen and Erno Lehtinen report on studies which have examined what students think about learning research methodology that have found students dislike learning about research methodology and do not see the reasons why they should be engaged in research as they do not perceive its relevance to their future careers. The historical division in social and behavioural sciences into qualitative and quantitative methodologies also tends to confuse students’ understanding of methods. Not only do some undergraduate students not see why they should develop as a researcher, some academics with research and teaching roles also do not develop as researchers. For many academics, research is just one part of a complex job including teaching and administration and professional engagement. So in thinking about and making decisions about research, academics have to balance different work priorities. In Chapter 12 Angela Brew and David Boud explore the ways in which academics with different research publication records balance the demands of research, and their teaching and administrative roles. They argue that although much is known about the factors that contribute to research productivity, examination of the negative case – the factors contributing to non-productivity – is almost absent in the literature. In their chapter they indicate that there is not a one-to-one relationship between a researcher’s productivity as defined by publications and research grants, and researcher identity. Some academics without a research track record nevertheless identify themselves as researchproductive. This chapter demonstrates that productive researchers have different priorities in terms of teaching and administration than those who do not demonstrate research productivity and shows how this is reflected in the differing amounts of time that academics spend on research. The chapter also suggests disciplinary differences in the extent to which the doctorate is perceived to have prepared them for independent research and publication.
Conclusion The work represented here is indicative of a broad and growing field of study. All of the chapters present work in progress and we consider that, like any complex field of investigation, they raise more questions than they answer. In the complex, perplexing and challenging socio-political context of contemporary higher education, academic research flourishes, academic researchers weave their careers and their identities and, most importantly of all play an important part in growing the ways in which society more broadly
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understands the world. In the final chapter, Angela Brew and Gerlese Åkerlind reflect on how the research to understand these processes, which has been presented in this book, enhances our understanding of the field of academic research and points to fruitful areas for future research.
References Barnett, R. and Di Napoli, R. (eds) (2008) Changing Identities in Higher Education: Voicing Perspectives. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boud, D. and Lee, A. (eds) (2009) Changing Practices in Doctoral Education. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1988) Homo Academicus, trans. P Collier. Cambridge: Polity Press. Breen, R. and Lindsay, R. (1999) Academic research and student motivation, Studies in Higher Education, 24(1): 75–93. Chappell, C., Rhodes, C., Solomon, N., Tennant, M. and Yates, L. (2003) Reconstructing the Lifelong Learner: Pedagogy and Identity in Individual, Organizational and Social Change. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Golde, C. M., Walker, G. E. and Associates (eds) (2006) Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Stanford, CA: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Hall, S. (1996) Introduction: who needs identity? In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity (pp. 1–17). London: Sage. Healey, M. (2005) Linking research and teaching: disciplinary spaces, in R. Barnett (ed.) Reshaping the University: New Relationships between Research, Scholarship and Teaching (pp. 30–42). Maidenhead: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Henkel, M. (2000) Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Jenkins, A., Blackman, T., Lindsay, R. and Paton-Saltzberg, R. (1998) Teaching and research: student perspectives and policy implications, Studies in Higher Education, 23(2): 127–41. Land, R. (2001) Agency, context and change in academic development, International Journal for Academic Development, 6(1): 4–20. Marton, F. (1981) Phenomenography: describing conceptions of the world around us, Instructional Science, 10: 177–200. Park, C. (2004) The graduate teaching assistant (GTA): lessons from North American experience, Teaching in Higher Education, 9(3): 349–61. Pearson, M. and Brew, A. (2002) Research training and supervision development, Studies in Higher Education, 27(1): 135–50. Rigney, L.-I. (1999) Internationalization of an Indigenous anti-colonial cultural critique of research methodologies: a guide to Indigenist research methodology and its principles, Journal for Native American Studies, WICAZO sa Review, 14: 109–21. Robertson, J. and Blackler, G. (2006) Students’ experiences of learning in a research environment, Higher Education Research and Development, 25(3): 215–29. Seymour, E., Hunter, A. B., Laursen, S. L. and Deantoni, T. (2004) Establishing the
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benefits of research experiences for undergraduates in the sciences: first findings from a three-year study, Wiley InterScience, DO1 10.1002/sce.10131. Von Busekist, A. (2004) Uses and misuses of the concept of identity, Security Dialogue, 35(1): 81–98. Zamorski, B. (2002) Research-led teaching and learning in higher education: a case, Teaching in Higher Education, 7(4): 411–27.
7 Balancing different audiences: experiences of Dutch academics Liudvika Leisˇyte˙ , Jürgen Enders and Harry F. de Boer
Introduction Since the 1970s, major reforms in higher education and research systems have taken place throughout Europe. The university management models gradually adopted in the 1980s and 1990s entailed a much more direct ideological and political attack on traditional, institutional and professional autonomy of universities (de Boer et al. 2007). Although the importance of academic freedom has been continuously acknowledged to be the cornerstone of the higher education legitimacy (Neave and Van Vught 1994; Neave 2002), there has been an emphasis on increasingly steering academic research agendas from outside the academic community. It is clearly indicated in the Magna Carta of European Universities ‘Freedom in research and training is the fundamental principle of university life, which must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power’ (Andren and Johansson-Dahre 1993, p. 42). Studies of the role of different audiences in steering academic problem choice point to the increasing role of intermediary bodies such as research councils and research sponsors in setting research agendas (Berdahl 1990; Henkel 2005). Given such a backdrop, it is interesting to explore to what extent the changes in the Dutch higher education and research sector filter through the system from the top to the bottom, i.e. from the state to the research unit level within universities. The aim of this chapter is to explore how higher education and research reforms in the Netherlands have influenced research practices, especially problem choice of research units in Dutch research universities. We look at the extent to which academics have freedom to choose lines of research in two disciplinary research fields: biotechnology and medieval history. We use interview data collected in 2005, supplemented with documentary and secondary literature analysis. The chapter starts with an overview of the higher education and research reforms in the Netherlands since the 1980s and then the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the issue at stake are presented. The
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chapter proceeds with an exploration of research practices in four research units in the Netherlands. The focus in this exploration is on the extent to which the units are free to choose research problems. We assume that academics in principle wish to keep their professional autonomy as much as they can and that they want to design their own research questions using their academic freedom. Preferably, external interference should be minimal. However, due to the changes in institutional environments – some of them explicitly focused on externally defining research agendas, programmes and themes – this may no longer be the case. Finally, reflection on stability and change in research practices is provided.
The changing context of Dutch university research units In 1985, the Dutch government introduced the concept of ‘steering from a distance’, in which beliefs about the virtues of regulation and planning were meant to set ‘the boundary conditions within which the higher education system is to operate’ (Goedegebuure et al. 1994, p. 196). The idea, generally made known in the White Paper Higher Education: Autonomy and Quality (HOAK), was to position the national government in the role of catalyst, coordinator and (financial) facilitator and to enhance the autonomy of the universities (Maassen and Van Vught 1988; De Vijlder and Mertens 1990). Since then, this idea has been developed further in several laws, strategic plans, and government White Papers. In the national strategic higher education and research plan of 2000 (Hoger Onderwijs en Onderzoeksplan) (MOCW 2000), governmental deregulation and increased self-regulation of the higher education sector were still being stressed. The national government made clear its intention to continue along the same lines: enhancing institutional autonomy and strengthening market orientation (MOCW 2000, p. 36). In the same document the minister also briefly suggested that the future relationship between the national government and the universities should be characterized more as contractual (MOCW 2000, p. 37). After 2004, further deregulation, enhanced institutional autonomy, and increased accountability remained the buzzwords. The government intended to exercise its powers in relation to institutional outputs and the societal consequences of the universities’ performances. In 2005, the government launched its ideas for a completely new national Act on higher education in what was called the ‘Legislation Note’ (Wetgevingsnotitie) (MOCW 2005). According to the then minister, due to fundamental changes in the world of higher education, the 1993 national higher education Act was outdated and needed such a thorough revision that a completely new Act was justified. The underlying rationale of this and related White Papers, however, seamlessly fit the HOAK steering philosophy: government steering from a distance while granting the universities substantial institutional autonomy. The government
Balancing different audiences 119 wanted to encourage universities even further to act as societal entrepreneurs. Universities should become real corporate organizations, being prompt in responding to the needs of the economy and the labour market (de Boer and Goedegebuure 2007). The government also stressed that units with stakeholder interests should play a more prominent role in setting directions. This is referred to as ‘horizontal accountability’. In 2007, however, a new cabinet came to power and, at least for the moment, ideas for a new national Act will not be put into practice. Nevertheless, after more than 20 years, the 1985 philosophy still forms the core of the way in which the government is steering Dutch higher education and research. In this period many reforms have been implemented to put the philosophy of steering from a distance into practice. New national funding schemes, the introduction of quality assessment procedures for teaching and research, the devolution of authority from the state to the universities on ‘matters of personnel’, and the introduction of a new internal governance structure for universities are examples of ‘HOAK-related’ reforms that have significantly changed the institutional arrangements regarding Dutch researchers. Also with respect to research policies, the government has changed its approach over the years. Since the late 1970s, it has showed an increased interest in research affairs and it has taken many policy initiatives to rationalize academic research and to increase the internal efficiency of science production. Public research should increasingly be nationally programmed, more transparent and in harmony with social needs, evaluated in terms of quality and being accounted for. Apart from these policy goals, over the years there has also been a growing emphasis on competition, innovation, knowledge utilization (‘valorization’) and partnerships with industry. The implications of these policy changes for universities have been widely discussed (de Boer et al. 2000; de Boer 2003; de Boer et al. 2007). As these studies reveal, the redistribution of authority from the state to the universities has had many consequences, which are likely to affect research practice at the shopfloor level in universities. We observe, for instance, a strengthening of the managerial powers within universities, an increased monitoring of performances and outputs and a growing emphasis on science. Over the years, internally defined criteria for research have been complemented by externally defined criteria (Blume et al. 1985; van Rossum 1987; Hazeu 1989). In universities, strategic research planning has increasingly come to the fore. It seems that by empowering institutional leadership and by providing these leaders with information on performance, research agendas are no longer entirely controlled by individual academics. However, it is unclear to what extent these changes at the national and the institutional level have really impinged on the autonomy of academics to decide which research topics to pursue. There is little evidence of the implications of the governance changes for shopfloor level activities (Jongbloed and van der Meulen 2006; Leisˇyte˙ 2007).
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Theoretical considerations Famous laboratory studies within the sociology of science in the 1970s produced a conceptual understanding of how scientists function within their institutional environment. In particular, the credibility cycle model introduced by Latour and Woolgar has been helpful in understanding academic research practices in which inputs (ideas, problems, methods) are turned into outputs (funding and reputation) in order to build academic credibility (Latour and Woolgar 1979). The model draws attention to the importance of reputation and credit within the academic community. The credibility cycle is continuous; recognition, prestige and resources playing an important role. The extension of this model in later accounts points to the shifting audiences that academics address and the possible conflicts this may cause. The changing institutional environment may mean different expectations from academics of what and how to research. In essence, what counts in the end is the ability of the academic to convert their own work in such a way as to make it count for different audiences (Knorr-Cetina 1982; Lehenkari 2003). Thus building credibility occurs in several areas that interact with each other: research sponsors, the scientific community, regulatory authorities and university management (Leisˇyte˙ 2007). These audiences are important in the institutional environment as they influence the rules, norms, values, and beliefs that may either facilitate or obstruct the credibility-building process of research units. With changes in higher education and research systems, audiences and institutions governing basic research units also changed, which means that the credibility cycle of research units may be affected. One of the possible interpretations is that these new audiences, such as regulatory bodies or industry, influence the research agendas of academics. In other words, both the new and old audiences may have an impact on the inputs of the academic credibility cycle as well as on the rules of the credibility game itself. To understand how research units react to changes in their institutional environment, Oliver’s (1991) typology is useful. Building on notions of resource dependence and on neo-institutional theories from organizational sociology, she argues that research units act through particular strategies created and implemented in response to the changes in the institutional environment. From her typology we derive the following strategies:
• Passive compliance and conformity to external rules, norms and interests of stakeholders. The compliance strategy means adherence of research units to the myths and ceremonies within their institutional environment even if it means changing their core activities. • Symbolic compliance. The symbolic compliance strategy means the buffering of research units’ actual activities from the formal structure. • Pro-active manipulation and negotiation of the environment. This strategy is seen as a high level of resistance to an institutional environment and even influencing the environment according to the research unit’s preferences.
Balancing different audiences 121 The type of strategy implies the ability or inability to maintain the status quo in the activities of the research unit. In the current study, the professional autonomy of research units therefore can be indicated by the type of response they use to react to their institutional environment. If a research unit uses a compliance strategy, it may imply a change of its core activity, such as setting the research agenda according to the requirements of the institutional environment and, thus, restraining their academic freedom to a certain extent. On the other hand, if a research unit chooses a manipulation strategy, it can determine its own research agenda and even influence the agenda setting within the institutional environment.
Methodology The empirical data of our study come from documentary evidence as well as interviews with the four cases of biotechnology and medieval history research units. The selection of the cases is based on theoretical sampling, i.e. the cases aim to predict contrasting results for predictable reasons ( Yin 2003, p. 47). Medieval history and biotechnology were chosen because theory suggests that these two disciplinary research fields (‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ sciences (Biglan 1973) differ in culture, which has an impact on the way they respond to changes in their institutional environment. Multiple sources of evidence were collected in this study based on a rationale of triangulation (Yin 2003). The study used documents, literature, and semi-structured interviews. The documents and the literature address the period since the 1980s. During 2005, 16 interviews in four university research units and six interviews with top and middle university managers in the Netherlands were carried out. Further, 15 interviews with experts and decision-makers at the national level were conducted to gain further insights in the context of higher education and research reforms in the Netherlands. The interviews took place in October 2005 – January 2006. The unit of analysis is a research unit within departments, institutes or research centres that have their own administrative, physical, and academic existence. These research units have their own organizational behaviour and settings and are supposed to act on the basis of the unit’s interests and those of their individual members.
Empirical findings Problem choice in Dutch biotechnology research units In principle, academics in both Dutch biotechnology research units have academic freedom to decide what and how they want to research. Their ideas usually come from unanswered questions from previous research that organically follows developments in their discipline. However, both biotechnology
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research units indicated that they are conditioned by funding for their research and therefore external sponsors can be influential in guiding their problem choice. Due to the nature of biotechnology, academics in both research units heavily rely on collaborations; problem choice may be a collective endeavour. A post-doctoral researcher articulated this as follows: When you want to write a project proposal, you ideally want to have a proof principal so you can do the work. So that’s one. Two, do you have a suitable collaboration, cause it’s often needed for a grant proposal. So that’s the basis actually. If you have those two and [have] a good idea, you can start writing. (35) Within the research units, the collaborative spirit is maintained by their leaders, where open discussion of research topics is encouraged. In this respect, problem choice can be regarded as a ‘team effort’. In the case of collaboration with industry, academics intended to maintain their freedom to define their research agenda and preferred not to comply with the external agendas set by the industry. In this way, the research units maintained their credibility by adhering to the principles of academic freedom and aiming to serve primarily the academic community. Respondents in the biotechnology units emphasized the importance of ‘fitting’ research ideas into the overall themes and strategic directions of the unit that are ‘pretty vague’ as characterized by the unit leader. This is not surprising given that they are reached through discussion and consensus among the unit members and there is a general willingness to be embedded in the research unit and collaborative work. This applies to both junior and senior academics, although their situation as regards freedom to choose their own research questions differs. Junior researchers tended to be influenced by their professors concerning which topics to pursue, especially when it came to writing collaborative big project proposals for external funding bodies. In the case of more experienced post-doctoral researchers, however, the name of the professor was only added to the project proposal at the end; there is no real steering of problem choice taking place, as noted by a postdoc (p. 28). The influence of professors is also significant in discussions of overall research themes of the research units. They determine the major areas and directions. Post-doctoral researchers usually fit into this general framework. The attitude of maintaining their own priorities in line with the overall research agenda of the unit is supported by faculty management. The managers do not impinge on the academic freedom of research units. The unit leaders thought that as long as they play the game in the right way, i.e. maintain high quality and attract external funding, the research units can pursue problems of their own choosing. In other words, as long as the research units are successful in building their academic credibility for the academic community, the university management seemed not to influence the actual problem choice of the biotechnology research units. This is
Balancing different audiences 123 expressed by a research unit leader who said that the management understands that academics work best when they have freedom for manoeuvre in what and how to research: You have to keep that door [managers’] closed. If I were to go to every meeting where managers tell us how to get into running initiatives, I would never be here. It’s probably for the best they do that, they push for new funds, new initiatives, but I just have to make sure we do good research and if there are any opportunities that pop up, you should be able to work on that. I think we get a lot of freedom, and rightly so. It also depends on which people you hired but if you trust that someone wants to do his job properly, you should give him the freedom to do so. (33) At the same time, external funding from the National Research Council (NWO) or European Union (EU) schemes can prescribe certain thematic areas that are more likely to get funded. As substantial external funding is indispensable to the research units due to the nature of biotechnology research, academics tend to be careful in balancing their own research priorities and those of the external sponsors. Usually, they write proposals in a certain way so as to fit the external criteria and choose a fashionable topic among the scientific community. Researchers are open about their strategic behaviour in this regard. For instance, one professor notes: The theme we are working on is very popular. I mean there are many grants you can apply for, so there is a constant possibility to apply for grants. Of course you try to fit in as well as you can in the theme they want. Try to write to some extent what they want to hear. (36) When talking about the EU-funded research projects, both of the Dutch biotechnology research units were concerned about the constantly changing research priorities. They have to focus on specific areas and programmes and that can be a problem as it may require shifts in the research agenda. However, researchers did not indicate any examples of such behaviour as they usually bid for funding that fitted with their own research problem choice and try to be creative in choosing the right programme. This does not come without real concerns about how to balance the two. As exemplified by a professor: EU priorities change, so one has to be creative with themes in order to get proposals through: I mean, EU is now focusing mainly on health, so it’s all about health. So you have to refocus and if you are in a field where your bacteria are not really health-related, you have to find a way. Otherwise you cannot make proposals any more. You have to be creative around the themes they choose. (27)
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In many cases this means framing the questions in the correct way, but in essence this does not change the key focus of their research agenda. They are successful in using the symbolic compliance strategy and obtaining funding from external sponsors. Problem choice in biotechnology research units is thus a collection of decisions about a researcher’s own research interests, collaboration opportunities, research unit strategic priorities and external project grant requirements. Different audiences are thus important for the credibility building of research units. Although researchers follow the preferences of external sponsors, they do not change their preferred research topics; that is, they retain their academic freedom. Credibility-building within the academic community is most important.
Problem choice of Dutch medieval history research units Looking at medieval history in the Netherlands, the professional autonomy of researchers is traditionally high in terms of deciding on their research agenda. Their research is not as resource-intensive as in the biotechnology field, and it is evident that external research funding is more a facilitator of research as it helps to ‘buy’ time from teaching rather than determining research topics. So who decides on the problem choice in medieval history units? The responses of academics in medieval history show that their research agenda is predominantly driven by their own research interests. Although medieval historians are concerned about the priorities of external funding bodies and the multidisciplinary themes of their research institutes, these factors do not affect or influence their problem choice. This is in part due to the medieval historians’ ability to utilize strategies to ensure their academic freedom. Academics in both of the medieval history research units indicated that the selection of research topics is a bottom-up activity where the most important considerations are the researcher’s academic preferences usually based on consultations with the academic community. This is true both for professors and junior academics. One of the professors went so far as to state that research cannot be strictly organized or programmed. A post-doctoral researcher felt she has a lot of room to manoeuvre in deciding what and how to research: There is a lot of freedom, really a lot of possibilities to find your own voice; do your own thing and that has led to the most wonderful results. For instance, an AiO [an employed PhD candidate] here who started two years ago or so, made a major discovery. She found manuscripts that were thought lost and people have been looking for them since the early nineteenth century. And she goes, reads her footnotes, thinks very deep and goes to the archives and finds them. That to us is something ‘Whaaa’, to open your champagne for. In that sense, yes,
Balancing different audiences 125 there is, as long as there is no money involved. And that has not changed in my time. (31) Researchers from both units mentioned certain factors that can influence the selection of research topics, such as the overall themes of the research unit or university institute, popularity of the topic and related likelihood of external research funding. The multidisciplinary nature of research programmes in the umbrella research institutes that both research units belong to, was mentioned as a possible influence on their research agendas. In general, however, medieval historians were not too worried about them since they could easily find an area where their own research topics fitted well. Usually a rather broad research programme was drafted which ‘is written in a way that there are plenty of possibilities for people’. A more important aspect for researchers was following the traditions of a research unit which has a specific research area and a specific medieval history period that it tackles. When it comes to external funding bodies, both research units emphasized the importance of ‘wrapping’ their ideas in the priorities and specific thematic areas of the external research funding body, which is usually the National Research Council (NWO). These priorities seemed not to influence the research agenda of medieval historians as their strategy of wording the proposals in a certain way seemed to be working rather well. Thus, the external sponsors may frame the research questions, but do not direct them. For instance, a post-doctoral researcher who secured external research funding shares an experience that is quite common among medieval historians: If I learn that NWO is starting a project, we are inclined to do this. Of course you start thinking about well, what could I do with that, so it does influence your thoughts, but in the end, I guess, if you are really at the moment that you are writing a proposal, it’s basically, how can I sell this? (30) Strategies for ensuring the higher likelihood of funding included making the topic look relevant for and attractive to the funding body. It could also lead to choosing a broad and interdisciplinary topic that would fit into the preferences of the external research sponsor, as vividly described by a professor: I currently have a research proposal awaiting funding that involves urbanisation and city culture. This is a non-recurring NWO funded programme. My colleague in history has submitted an application for three studies; one for an archaeologist, one for a literature historian, and one for a social economic researcher. They have a research proposal which uses all three research areas. This type of multidisciplinary research is usually very successful in getting funding. (24)
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Further, some researchers, especially post-doctoral researchers, thought that the relevance of certain topics for the academic community could influence funding from the external funding bodies: ‘One sees, for example, something about religion. Actuality of religion they think is something that scores at the ministry and may get funding. That is how the matters are’ (23). Besides relevance, research ‘hypes’ are mentioned as a possible determinant of research topics. The junior researchers are particularly conscious of these fashionable topics as exemplified by a post-doctoral researcher: In my case, I grab everything I can get, simple as that. I need to keep a job, but in general when people write research proposals, you just have to link up to international sexy research, so to speak. Right now it’s ethnic identities and barbarians . . . I think that’s one of the only ways to get subsidised. There are always these questions: ‘How shall we write this?’, ‘Who might be the international referees?’, ‘Who might they choose?’ There are five options, for instance, not more than that. So, it is politics. (31) In fact, these topical themes may determine the choices of problem for junior researchers. But the actual implementation and the real problem choices are left up to the researcher once the funding is secured, as seen by a postdoctoral researcher: ‘As soon as the project is awarded, yeah, it’s my project. I get all the freedom I want.’ Thus, in the end, there is a strategy to keep one’s own research preferences even among the junior academics after the funding has been granted. Thus, again we witness the strategy of symbolic compliance where the credibility building for the academic community is of primary importance. Such strategies of how to ‘sell the topic’, to balance external sponsors’ priorities and personal research interests are common in both research units. One of the concerns expressed by researchers concerning such external funding and the strategies related in acquiring it is the ambiguity of real funding criteria and rules and the awareness of internal politics of the external sponsors. For instance, a post-doctoral researcher doubted if excellence was always the criterion: But to feel this whole machine of procedures, I mean, it is so far away, it’s a very abstract level. These people in The Hague, sometimes it seems that they just throw dice and reject excellent people. I mean, of course, you hear stories from each other and colleagues that people who are so good get rejected time and again, and then you think: ‘Read his proposal, people, come on, think, use your brains for God’s sake.’ But they don’t get it. Somebody who has a go at it as well, they get funded. It is very difficult to understand how this mechanism works. On paper within the theoretical framework, it is all very beautiful, and wonderful, but in practice it’s not. (31)
Balancing different audiences 127 Neither the external funding bodies nor the research institutes seem to significantly influence the research agenda in both research units. Researchers still appear to follow their own interests in choosing research topics, although they are conscious of ‘relevant’ and ‘hot’ topics while applying for external sponsorship. In other words, neither university management nor external sponsors can really steer the research agenda of the two Dutch medieval history units.
Conclusion In the Netherlands, the period since the early 1980’s can be described as years of change and stability for Dutch academe. On the one hand, the institutional environments within which academic research is embedded have changed significantly. On the other hand, as our empirical findings show, traditional disciplinary-based research is at the same time still perceived and experienced as important for earning academic credibility for both the individual researchers and collectives. There has been a political drive for relevant as well as excellent research for the economic development of the country. This political drive is being transformed into reality by a range of initiatives to programme research at the national and the university level. Moreover, the direct environment of academics, the university setting, has changed as well, partly because of government-initiated reforms. Dutch universities have been ‘encouraged’ to be more tightly managed with a more business-like attitude (e.g. de Boer et al. 2007). In general, the influence on academic work, especially on research, has been visible in new regimes for evaluating research performances, requirements for increased transparency through monitoring and accountability schemes, and a push for the economic relevance of research. There is a tendency for a structural transformation towards working in teams, towards multidisciplinary research and towards (international) collaboration and orientation (academic consortia and third party collaborations). In other words, generally speaking the context of scientific research in the Netherlands has clearly been changing. It is likely that such changes in the institutional environments of researchers will influence the research practices within universities. However, particularly when it comes to research, the academics’ professional autonomy in the sense of having control over their own work is a strong and highly valued attribute, which implies that new institutional realities will not be incorporated without demur. Moreover, the government’s and the university’s dependency on academic performance for economic progress and institutional reputation gives researchers a power base to resist change. As a consequence, the impacts of a changing institutional environment on university research practices at the shopfloor level are hard to predict. Strategies of compliance, symbolic action, manipulation or ignoring all seem possible. In our view, the selection of research topics (problem choice) is one of
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the key aspects of professional autonomy and the questions are whether and how this aspect is influenced by institutional changes. For this purpose we investigated the research practices of research units in two disciplinary research fields, biotechnology and medieval history, assuming that different responses to changing environments would show up because of the existence of different cultures (e.g. Biglan 1973). Our findings demonstrate both similarities and differences between the biotechnologists and the medievalists with respect to the selection of research topics. The evidence from all four Dutch cases indicates the persistence of academic freedom and the accompanying traditional academic values such as disinterestedness. Keeping professional autonomy is paramount for all research units and by and large they report that they still can successfully define their own research agenda. Our results show that a strategy of strict compliance with the new rules of the game does not occur. Changing research practices through institutional reforms, at least when it comes to problem choice, is far from easy. However, the findings also indicate that the researchers in both academic research fields do not completely ignore the changes in context. Symbolic action and manipulation as a response to change are widely used. Researchers take into account relevant and hot research topics while applying for external sponsorships. Their problem choice is framed by others, but the biotechnologists and medievalists argue that these frames leave ample room to satisfy their research interests. Symbolic action in the sense of being successful to attract funds from research programmes that are defined by others while simultaneously pursuing their own research interests (‘doing things they want to do’) is a common strategy in both academic research fields. Proactive manipulation of and negotiating on national and institutional research agendas are also common. Researchers voice their interests through participation in institutional research institutes as well as in external evaluation and research funding bodies. As a result of such participation in research decision-making they can protect their own disciplinary research interests. But of course not all that glitters is gold. The researchers acknowledge that they cannot close their eyes to the external demands and changing value systems (e.g. stressing relevance and excellence). Somehow they have to balance their own research interests and those of external funding bodies. But for the moment these external constraints are manageable. Another concern when selecting research topics is related to inconstant political circumstances. Being swayed by the political and economic issues of the day means that research themes must be picked with great care. While the research units from both academic research fields successfully retain control over the selection of research topics, there are some differences as well. In biotechnology, problem choice is much more regarded as a ‘team effort’, in which the professors’ influence is significant. Purely individual problem choice is in this respect somewhat restricted, particularly for junior researchers. Medievalists are more individualistic. The latter implies among other things that collaboration at the level above the research unit
Balancing different audiences 129 (the research institute or research school) is more problematic and leads to discussions with management on how to rationalize and programme research. Biotechnologists report that managers do not impinge on the academic freedom of the research units (as long as they have excellent performance records). Another difference between the two research fields is that research in biotechnology requires more financial resources. Substantial external funding is indispensable, which means that compared to medievalists, biotechnologists must carefully balance their own research priorities and those of external sponsors. Biotechnologists cannot afford to ignore thirdparty funding and therefore negotiate with business and take into account research programmes of national and international research councils. For them, different audiences are important and the preferences of external sponsors are taken seriously. Nevertheless, just like their colleagues from medieval history, at the end of the day they are convinced that they can rather autonomously pick their own research themes. If this were not the case, in their opinion, it would make academic research meaningless.
Acknowledgements We acknowledge support for this study from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the project ‘Comparative Study on Management and Self-governance Models’ of 2003–2006. We also acknowledge the further support of the DFG during 2006–2009 for a second stage of the overall project. This will allow us to revisit the countries and research units under investigation in this chapter, to investigate further cross-national comparisons including Austria and Germany, and analyse policies at the supra-national EU level.
References Andren, C. G. and Johansson-Dahre, U. (1993) Academic freedom and university autonomy, in CEPES (ed.) Academic Freedom and University Autonomy, paper on Higher Education Series. Bucharest: CEPES UNESCO. Berdahl, R. (1990) Academic freedom, autonomy and accountability in British universities, Studies in Higher Education, 15(2): 169–81. Biglan, A. (1973) The characteristics of subject matter in different academic areas, Journal of Applied Psychology, 57(3): 195–213. Blume, S. S., Spaapen, J. B. and Prins, A. A. M. (1985) De externe beoordeling van wetenschappelijk onderzoek aan Nederlandse universiteiten en hogescholen. Twee jaar Voorwaardelijke Financiering: een leerprocess. ’s-Gravenhage: Staatsdrukkerij. de Boer, H. (2003) Who’s afraid of red, yellow and blue? The colourful world of management reforms, in A. Amaral, V. L. Meek and I. M. Larsen (eds) The Higher Education Managerial Revolution? Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. de Boer, H., Denters, S. A. H. and Goedegebuure, L. (2000) Dutch disease of Dutch model? An evaluation of the pre-1998 system of democratic university
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government in the Netherlands, in R. Weissberg (ed.) Democracy and the Academy (pp. 123–40). Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers. de Boer, H. F., Enders, J. and Leisˇyte˙ , L. (2007) Public sector reform in Dutch higher education: the organizational transformation of the university, Public Administration, 85(1): 27–46. de Boer, H. and Goedegebuure, L. (2007) Modern governance and codes of conduct in Dutch higher education, Higher Education Research and Development, 26(1): 45–55. De Vijlder, F. J. and Mertens, F. J. H. (1990) Hoger onderwijs-arbeidsmarkt: zorgenkind of betekenisvol perspectief? Tijdschrift voor Hoger Onderwijs, 8(2): 42–54. Goedegebuure, L., Kaiser, F., Maassen, P., Meek, L., Vught, F. A. v. and Weert, E. d. (1994) Higher Education Policy: An International Perspective, Oxford: IAU and Pergamon. Hazeu, C. A. (1989) Systeem en gedrag in het wetenschappelijk onderzoek, ’s-Gravenhage: Vuga. Henkel, M. (2005) Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy environment, Higher Education, 49(1–2): 155–76. Jongbloed, B. and van der Meulen, B. (2006) De follow-up van onderzoeksvisitaties. Onderzoek in opdracht van de Commissie Dynamisering. Eindrapportage. Investeren in dynamiek. Eindrapport commissie Dynamisering (deel 2). Enschede: CHEPS. Knorr-Cetina, K. D. (1982) Scientific communities or transepistemic arenas of research? A critique of quasi-economic models of science, Social Studies of Science and Public Policy, 12: 101–30. Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. (1979) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. London: Sage Publications. Lehenkari, J. (2003) On the borderline of food and drug: constructing credibility and markets for a functional food product, Science as Culture, 12(4): 499–525. Leisˇyte˙ , L. (2007) University Governance and Academic Research: Case Studies of Research Units in Dutch and English Universities. Enschede: CHEPS. Maassen, P. and Van Vught, F. A. (1988) An intriguing Janus-head: the two faces of the new governmental strategy for higher education in the Netherlands, European Journal of Education, 23: 65–76. MOCW (2000) Hoger onderwijs en onderzoek plan [HOOP; Higher education and research plan]. Den Haag: Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap. MOCW (2005) Wergevingsnotitie ‘Naar een nieuwe wet op het hoger onderwijs en onderzoek’. Den Haag: Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap. Neave, G. (2002). Academic freedom in an age of globalization, Higher Education Policy, 15: 331–5. Neave, G. and Van Vught, F. A. (1994) Government and higher education in developing nations: a conceptual framework, in G. Neave and F. A. Van Vught (eds) Government and Higher Education Relationships across Three Continents: The Winds of Change (pp. 1–21). Oxford: Pergamon Press. Oliver, C. (1991) Strategic responses to institutional processes, Academy of Management Review, 16(1): 145–79. van Rossum, W. (1987) Sturing van wetenschap. De rol van onderzoekorganisaties. ’s-Gravenhage: Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen. Yin, R. K. (2003) Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 3rd edn. London: Sage Publications.
8 Post-colonial perspectives on interdisciplinary researcher identities Catherine Manathunga
Introduction There has been an increasing impetus from government policy, industry, research funding agencies, and universities carving out niches in the global education marketplace, for interdisciplinary research that addresses complex, real-life issues (Gibbons 1998; Brainard 2002). Much of the literature on interdisciplinary research links this socio-political agenda to the current global climate of complexity and uncertainty, combined with the implications of the knowledge economy for government policy and academia (Gibbons 1998; Barnett 2000; Nowotny et al. 2001). In particular, there is a focus on the need for knowledge that is contextualized, applied, transdisciplinary, and not necessarily carried out in universities. Gibbons (1998) defined this as Mode Two knowledge as opposed to Mode One knowledge that he described as pure, discipline-specific, accumulated knowledge. Much of this ‘modespeak’ has been discounted as an oversimplification of knowledge production (Fuller 1995). There is little doubt, however, that the needs of the knowledge economy have driven the rise in importance of interdisciplinary research (Klein 2003). Another key epistemological impetus for interdisciplinary knowledge has been the development of postmodernist constructions of knowledge, which regard knowledge production as partial, transient, multi-layered and coming from many perspectives (Klein 1996; Rowland 2003). Scholars argue that knowledge can continue to evolve through the creative synthesis of different disciplinary perspectives and the use of problem making, that is, critically examining and reconceptualizing issues in different ways, as well as problem-solving strategies (Foster 1999; McCarty 2001). The literature exploring this global, socio-political government agenda is as vast, diverse and complex as is interdisciplinarity itself. There is a proliferation of terms such as multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity to choose from. Even after such a selection is made, very few people agree on precise definitions. I have chosen to use the term interdisciplinarity
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rather than the more recent, popular term transdisciplinarity because it emphasizes the creative synthesis and new understandings that become possible when disciplines become integrated. Many researchers have now taken up the challenge of engaging in interdisciplinary research. There is a huge literature on approaches to interdisciplinary research and philosophical reasons for engaging in it but very little attention has been paid to the impact it has on researchers’ identities and working habits. This chapter explores reasons why researchers at an Australian research-intensive university became interdisciplinary researchers and the attributes they regarded as important for successful interdisciplinary research. I use the post-colonial theories of liminality, unhomeliness and transculturation (Pratt 1992; Bhabha 1994) to (re)interpret the lived experiences of these interdisciplinary researchers. Each of these theoretical paradigms is outlined and related to interdisciplinary researcher identities. The main section of the chapter will demonstrate how these interdisciplinary researchers’ lived experience can be characterized using these post-colonial tropes. This sheds new light on the working habits of interdisciplinary researchers and establishes the need for radical shifts in research policies and practices to facilitate the further development of interdisciplinary research.
Post-colonial theories of identity The sense of self brought to the work of research is continually growing, evolving and taking on different shapes and hues, even among disciplinary scholars. These experiences are intensified for interdisciplinary researchers because of their continual disciplinary border-crossing. The shifting, complex nature of interdisciplinary researcher identities can be usefully understood using post-colonial theory. In particular, the post-colonial theories that are most useful to this exploration of researcher identity are those about liminality, unhomeliness and transculturation. These theories are notoriously difficult and highly contestable but they offer fresh perspectives on identity and power that are helpful in exploring interdisciplinary researcher identities. As an interdisciplinary scholar myself, I have also previously applied these theories to academic developer identities, intercultural postgraduate supervision and research training (Manathunga 2006; 2007a; 2007b; 2009). The risk with interdisciplinary work is always that your understandings of another field may be somewhat superficial. I feel this applies to my interpretations of post-colonial theory. These theories are multi-layered, under constant self-erasure and known to be particularly obtuse. I do, however, think that there is much to gain by applying even a basic knowledge of post-colonial theory to identity and pedagogical issues in other fields. The first construct that I have drawn upon is the idea of liminality. Liminality was initially used to describe the artwork of Renee Green, an AfricanAmerican artist, who represented the stairwell as a ‘liminal space, a pathway
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between the upper and lower areas, each of which was annotated with plaques referring to blackness and whiteness’ (Bhabha 1994, pp. 3–4). This liminal space is used as a metaphor for an in-between space where the ‘colonised subject . . . [is located] between colonial discourse and new noncolonial identities’ (Ashcroft et al. 1998, p. 130). Bhabha (1994) suggests that in this contested and unstable space, identities can be interrogated and engaged with and cultural change may take place. A number of scholars have described disciplines as separate cultures or ‘tribes’ (Becher and Trowler 2001), each with their own particular discourses, practices, and ways of knowing and being. As a result, when you engage in interdisciplinary research, you are located in that liminal space between and across diverse disciplinary cultures. The disciplinary identity that you may have originally formed becomes challenged and changed by your engagement with different disciplinary discourses and practices. The second post-colonial concept that is productive in understanding interdisciplinary researcher identities is that of unhomeliness. Unhomeliness is a concept used by Bhabha (1994, p. 9) to describe ‘the estranging sense of the relocation of home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’ that migrant workers, refugees, Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities experience. This construct tries to capture the cultural alienation, sense of uncertainty and discomfort that people such as interdisciplinary researchers experience as they adjust to new disciplinary discourses and cultural practices. It seeks to highlight the ambivalence people may feel about their own identity and the new disciplinary experiences they may have as they adjust to working across disciplines. Finally, transculturation is another post-colonial trope that has particular relevance for investigating the nature of interdisciplinary researcher identities. Transculturation describes how: subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant . . . culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own and what they use it for. (Pratt 1992, p. 6) In other words, interdisciplinary researchers have power and agency in their interactions with the different disciplines they work between to adopt certain practices and knowledge. For example, researchers may decide to adopt aspects of ways of thinking and being common in the other disciplines they are engaging with on interdisciplinary projects and may return to their own disciplines with the goal of incorporating some of these new practices, changing disciplinary cultures in the process. The impact of transculturation on interdisciplinary researchers’ identities is more than an issue of temporary accommodation or resistance to certain disciplinary cultural practices: it is also a form of adaptation that may create new cultural possibilities.
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Each of these post-colonial tropes recognizes the ambivalence, tension and discomfort interdisciplinary researchers experience as they cross disciplinary cultural boundaries as well as the deconstructive possibilities of creating new understandings through this research work. Interdisciplinary research is ‘both terrifying and liberating’ (Macdonald 2000, p. 244).
Methodology Twelve experienced interdisciplinary scholars were interviewed about their engagement in interdisciplinary research at an Australian research-intensive university (Manathunga et al. 2004). They represented a cross-section of many interdisciplines, including biotechnology, cognitive psychology, communication studies (humanities and psychology), materials science/social sciences, health sciences/social sciences (education, psychology, community development and inter-professional education) and e-commerce/IT areas. In this chapter, quotations from individual researchers are identified by a description of their interdisciplinary field, which can often only be best described using forward strokes. These interviews explored:
• researchers’ experiences of interdisciplinary research; • advice they would give to other researchers contemplating working in • • • •
interdisciplinary research, including research higher degree students and early career researchers; skills, attitudes and knowledge they regarded as necessary for effective interdisciplinary research; how they believed these skills could be taught; whether they had established/participated in any forms of interdisciplinary research education or staff development; how the university could support interdisciplinary research more effectively.
The interview data were initially subjected to content analysis that investigated researcher perceptions of their interdisciplinary experiences. From this, a number of significant themes were identified. These themes were then framed by the post-colonial theoretical constructs of liminality, unhomeliness and transculturation. As an interdisciplinary researcher myself, I will also include some segments of my own intellectual history and journey in order to highlight common interdisciplinary experiences.
Becoming an interdisciplinary researcher The insights into the lived experience of these interdisciplinary researchers provided by the interviews emphasize the simultaneous discomfort and intense emotional and intellectual rewards generated by engaging in
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interdisciplinary research. An important part of understanding the working habits and experiences of interdisciplinary researchers is to explore why they became interdisciplinary researchers in the first place. In some cases, these researchers had a long-standing interest in disciplinary boundary crossing that predated scholarly and government calls for interdisciplinary solutions to the problems of our postmodern world. Often these researchers were drawn by an inherent curiousity and a breadth of thinking. ‘You’ve got to be interested in the connections between things . . . [and have] a sense [of ] curiousity that drives down to some depth’ (material sciences/social science). The same researcher also emphasized that interdisciplinary research is ‘just much more fun, much more stimulating. [I] couldn’t stand being in a narrow and specializing discipline. It would be . . . mind-numbingly boring’ (materials science/social science). For other interdisciplinary researchers in this study, the most exciting developments in their original disciplines were located at the interfaces between disciplines, and movement into these liminal, in-between spaces was gradual and logical. As one researcher explained, ‘The most exciting research of chemistry that’s been done today I think is done at these interfaces . . . between biology and between material science . . . nanotechnology . . . biotechnology’ (biotechnology). So too, in some areas, research ‘questions can only be answered with interdisciplinary research’ (computer science). In other cases, researchers work in fields where the boundaries are drawn differently in different countries. For example, The field of communication in the US has a very long history . . . [that] came kind of equally out of the social sciences, particularly psychology and sociology and rhetoric . . . which comes right out of humanities . . . [but] here in Australia it’s been much more narrowly defined. (communication studies) A similar area is gerontology, which ‘embraces a number of disciplines not just in health and medical fields but . . . policy, all areas of social science . . . architecture . . . design, IT . . . management, psychology. It’s really a very all-encompassing profession’. Other researchers’ careers had been cut off in their original disciplines as a result of lack of ongoing employment opportunities or changes in life circumstances or beliefs and had re-emerged in other disciplines. For example, it was the lack of continuous employment opportunities in the field of history that resulted in my gradual movement through education and into the field of academic development. One of the researchers in this study also outlined how her postdoctoral work in a science field where she encountered an ‘extremely gender-biased environment’, which ‘might not be conducive to having a family’, led to work in ‘promoting women’s participation in science, engineering and technology’ and then on to a research career in IT (IT). On a more pragmatic level, some researchers were attracted to the greater funding and publication opportunities currently available for
136 Researcher experiences and identities interdisciplinary research. ‘So we know how to write grants to all of the different granting agencies . . . the potential for getting grants and getting publications is just enormous’, indicated one researcher (communication studies). So too, many funding bodies require interdisciplinary approaches. As one researcher suggested, ‘There are very few projects you can do now without interdisciplinary collaborations’ (health/public policy).
Working habits and attributes of interdisciplinary researchers The interdisciplinary researchers interviewed in this study were asked to reflect upon their working habits and the attributes a productive interdisciplinary researcher required. Their selection of key interdisciplinary attributes mirrored the extensive literature on interdisciplinary research skills (Bella and Williamson 1976; Grigg 1999; Klein 2001; McCarty 2001). All of the researchers in this study indicated that interdisciplinary research required broad, holistic ways of knowing and thinking. For the researchers in this study, the holistic thinking required for effective interdisciplinary research involved being ‘interested in the whole, in the connections, and forming links and integrating’ (material science/social science). They also stressed the importance of creative, lateral thinking; critical thinking; and highly developed, rapid learning skills. As one of the researchers remarked, interdisciplinarity is ‘that creative act of bringing things together versus the analytic act of dividing and analysing’ (material science/social science). They balance this creativity with critical thinking, enabling them to problematize traditional approaches to areas of research, creating a significant role for the problem-making disciplines of humanities and some social sciences (McCarty 2001). Researchers in this study also emphasized the need to be quick learners in reading across disciplinary boundaries (IT/ e-commerce). One of the key elements of critical reading was the art of ‘winnowing’ – reading widely but having the cognitive skills and enough knowledge of other disciplines to sort the vital material from the superfluous. Intercultural attributes, such as tolerance of ambiguity, flexibility and trust, were recommended by the researchers in this study in order to deal with epistemological, theoretical, linguistic and methodological diversity inherent in interdisciplinary work. One researcher described this as an ability to ‘work with somebody who has a very different theoretical perspective . . . and try to get inside where they’re coming from and then see where we can meet’ (education/health). So too, effective communication and teamwork skills were required by interdisciplinary researchers. The communication skills emphasized by the researchers in this study included networking and speaking effectively with people; active listening; developing a collaborative interdisciplinary language; and the ability to write together across disciplines. Effective interdisciplinary team collaboration required researchers
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who are skilled in collective decision-making and explicit and honest communication (Bauer 1990; Bella and Williamson 1976). One researcher in this study expressed it this way, ‘[It’s about] inter-group dynamics . . . you’ve really got to set [people] up to be valued’ (communication studies). There was a diversity of opinion among these researchers about definitions of effective interdisciplinary leadership. For some science-based researchers in this study, this involved having an ‘alpha being’, who had developed a reputation for excellence in a field and then set about drawing other disciplines into projects because ‘people get swept up in . . . [the] vision’ (biotechnology). For other researchers, the interdisciplinary leader acted as a kind of project manager, who had a broad ‘understanding of the issues from different perspectives’ (computer science) and ‘made sure that things are running smoothly across the whole’ (biotechnology). One social science researcher viewed an interdisciplinary leader as an independent arbiter between equals rather than a messianic figure (e-commerce).
Liminal research experiences – ‘butterflies’ The research experiences described by this group of interdisciplinary researchers emphasized the liminal, in-between nature of this kind of research. This liminality was troubling at times, but also productive and creative. Interdisciplinary research could be difficult because ‘nobody knows where the boundaries are. There’s no agreement, there’s no consensus about the scope’ of the research (communication studies). Other researchers may find interdisciplinary scholars’ identities slippery and hard to get a fix on. As one researcher argued, ‘People have to feel that you have a solid identity that they can relate to . . . You can appear . . . slightly disorientated . . . that you’ve got too many allegiances’ (IT). This could, at times, lead to ‘a clash of personalities and a clash of philosophies and a clash of cultures’ (e-commerce). Some researchers in this study argued that this clash of cultures could be ameliorated by training researchers about how ‘pervasive identity issues are . . . [and] that cultures are different, an awareness maybe of some of the ways they’re different, an awareness of how automatic those things are’ (communication studies). Each of the researchers in this study, however, also emphasized the way in which interdisciplinary work could be immensely intellectually and emotionally rewarding because of its liminal location. They emphasized the ‘breadth and richness’ (education/health) and the intellectual empowerment (education/community development) of ‘harnessing huge intellectual horsepower to address [research] problems’ (e-commerce) and pooling ‘control of enormous literatures and an enormous set of methodologies’ (communication studies). Indeed, for some researchers, it was the uncertainty and tension between ideas and disciplinary cultures that facilitated innovation and creative problem-solving. They recognized the need for their knowledge to be constantly challenged and unsettled in order to be
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productive. ‘The clash [between perspectives] . . . is probably the enjoyable side of it in terms of disturbing how we do things’, suggested one researcher (education/community development). These experiences of liminality can be best summed up with a metaphor for interdisciplinary research that emerged from one participant. He retold the story of being described as ‘a butterfly’ by a promotions committee: Obviously, meaning that I was flitting between things. And at some level . . . there’s an element of factual truth in that. But I think they were missing the point that . . . you’re seriously connecting with the flower. Then you might be transferring something pollen-like from here to there. (material science/social science) In many senses, interdisciplinary researchers are always in-between, flitting here and there, never settling for long, but the productive aspect of this liminality lies in its potential for creating new identities and knowledge.
Unhomely research experiences – ‘mongrels’ Interdisciplinary researchers also experienced their work as unhomely. They sometimes endured a sense of cultural alienation and ambivalence as they visited other disciplines and sought to understand and become conversant in them. Several researchers commented on this ‘horrible state of uncertainty’ (e-commerce) that was inherent in slipping across and between disciplinary boundaries. This involved ‘walk[ing] . . . into an area where I know nothing and ask[ing] very ignorant questions [which] takes a good deal of humility’, as one researcher explained (biotechnology). A number of researchers talked about their ‘isolation . . . from your own home discipline . . . so you have less in common with your home discipline . . . so . . . it can be . . . slightly disconnecting’ (material science/social science). This very closely mirrors the experiences of immigrants to new cultures or minorities within post-colonial countries when they no longer belong in their original culture nor in their adopted home’s culture. As another researcher argued, You are going to be much more on your own . . . than if you were in a discipline. And there is nowhere for you to hide . . . the buck stops with you and you have to be . . . not . . . frightened of some of the disadvantages like being alone. (IT) While some researchers sought to develop an interdisciplinary identity or to reinvent themselves under the ‘umbrella’ of a new discipline (IT), other researchers attempted to retain an ‘intellectual anchor’ in their original field (communication studies). ‘I needed to hang on to that identity as an [original disciplinary expert] and then move out from it to . . . a larger identity as
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a scholar’ (communication studies). For other researchers, this identity issue was an ongoing struggle. One researcher retold the story of one of her interdisciplinary colleagues who was in a very interdisciplinary area . . . and he kept telling me who he wasn’t. He wasn’t an electrical engineer, he wasn’t a linguist, he wasn’t an English person, he wasn’t a social scientist and finally I said to him ‘well, tell me who you are’. (communication studies) This unhomeliness was not only experienced between disciplinary cultures. As one researcher emphasized, there are also significant differences between academic and industry organizational social norms and work practices. Their experience in implementing a university–industry secondment particularly highlights the difficulties created by these implicit social norms. We had a secondment into the centre from the [industry partner] . . . and the culture shock on both sides was enormous . . . [especially] the completely different working styles . . . I suppose the person from the [industry partner] was used to interacting all day and this disturbed the academic staff . . . It’s very much the style of . . . something is drafted, it’s passed on to the next person . . . there’s lots of discussion at every stage. Whereas academics tend to work much more on their own when they’re writing, finish a product and then maybe give it to someone to read . . . It was a bit shocking . . . to us . . . and for the other person who felt suddenly [there] was no structure. (health/public policy) Some researchers in this study emphasized the need to return to their home disciplines for intellectual and personal respite – ‘there came a time where . . . after doing [interdisciplinary research] for seven years I began to feel . . . that I needed a kind of input from people who were more like-minded in order to push my own development forward’ (education/health). For others the boundary crossing had been so logical and their ability to continue contributing to their home disciplines remained so strong that ‘the transition has been really enjoyable’ (health/social sciences). This study also revealed the power dynamics and inequities involved in interdisciplinary research that can generate a great deal of unhomeliness and alienation for researchers involved. Indeed, disciplinary chauvinism can be as much a part of interdisciplinary research as racism can be of intercultural interactions. Many of the researchers interviewed in these studies described their experiences of disciplinary chauvinism. In a number of interdisciplinary fields, these occurred with members of the medical profession. One researcher recalled ‘one spectacular case where the team broke up quite dramatically because . . . there was a doctor on board who couldn’t accept that there were other people on the team that knew more’ (communication studies). In another case, a researcher described how there was a rhetorical celebration of diverse perspectives by a medical person, who then
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proceeded to contest everything they said with considerable aggression (education/health). In some cases, actual ethnic cultural difference can underlie this disciplinary chauvinism and make interdisciplinary research particularly unhomely and uncomfortable. As one researcher indicated, there can also be a national hierarchy . . . you know I am an Anglo and they’re an Asian . . . But also I’m in an Anglo-Saxon country and they’re a foreigner . . . And these things have an impact on people’s behaviour . . . it might make a person a little more hyper-sensitive. You . . . need to remember that maybe they’re operating from a sense of disadvantage . . . or they’re working from a sense of naturalness or advantage and they literally don’t see a problem. (communication studies) This same researcher suggested that in order to deal with this unhomeliness, it was important in interdisciplinary research ‘to give people a sense of value for who they are in the team. In other words to . . . acknowledge their home identity and to use that to help them fill the larger identity in the team’ (communication studies). The most apt metaphor encapsulating these experiences of unhomeliness was that of the ‘mongrel’ coined by one of the researchers in this study (e-commerce). He suggested that, ‘I think I characterize my scholarship as being mongrel scholarship’ because it derived from many different disciplinary sources. In many ways, those who bring a bit of everything to their research are never truly at home in the way that a so-called ‘pure bred’ disciplinary scholar might be. This is a destabilized identity but one that pulls together different perspectives and is, therefore, open to change and growth.
Experiences of research transculturation – ‘chameleons’ Researchers in this study also experienced disciplinary transculturation. They demonstrated their power and agency in developing new syntheses between the knowledge and practices of their home disciplines and those they visited or migrated into. While this transculturation generated many new cultural and disciplinary possibilities, it also presented difficulties for researchers in knowing how far they would adapt to the new disciplinary ideas and how much they would resist them. Interdisciplinary collaboration represented a tremendous opportunity for learning as a researcher for these participants. As one researcher explained, ‘You’re bringing your original training and perspectives but they are being vastly modified and coloured and directed by exposure to working with other people’ (materials science/social science). As a result, interdisciplinary researchers are people who are ‘more into synthesis . . . into relationships and . . . connections rather than into divide and conquer (positivist, reductionist)’
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(material science/social science). This inevitably leads to learning and transformation professionally and personally – ‘You continually change . . . you learn stuff, you’re a different person’, exclaimed one researcher (materials science/social science). This transformation was a slow process, however, as another researcher highlighted: It takes about two years to get the vocab . . . it takes about six weeks to get [to] the stage where you stop feeling stupid . . . it then takes about two years before you start using it in a way that people in the other field consider to be acceptable. (computer science) These researchers emphasized how interdisciplinary work not only created new cultural and knowledge possibilities, but also impacted upon their understanding of their original discipline. As one researcher declared, interdisciplinary research ‘sharpened my understanding of what I was doing [in my own discipline] because I found myself in a situation of having to respond . . . to questions that I had never had to think about’ (education/ health). Another researcher emphasized how interdisciplinary research enabled you to ‘see how others look at [your discipline]. . . and that can be confronting at times’ (materials science/social science). This illustrates how transculturation is a two-way process between cultures or disciplines. The effects of this transculturation were experienced by these researchers as highly productive. ‘People are really freed up from the constraints that their native discipline or . . . cultural affiliations or tribalism might . . . put on them . . . They are aware all the time that there are other realities’, one researcher argued (materials science/social science). They highlighted the breadth and depth that was possible in interdisciplinary research – ‘being able to see things from different perspectives makes the investigation richer, because you are bringing to bear those different perspectives in a way that kind of highlights the aspects in different ways’ (education/health). Their passion for their research shone through each interview. As one researcher declared, ‘It boils down to passion . . . [your research] makes you want to stay up at night . . . working on it, thinking about it’ (biotechnology). The emotional dimension of interdisciplinary research has often been ignored in the past. As one researcher emphasized, ‘The emotional skeleton . . . is as important as the intellectual skin and . . . blood’ (IT). As always, however, there were disturbing aspects to this transculturation as well. For some researchers, interdisciplinary work shook the core of their professional and personal identities. As one researcher explained, ‘I have to constantly make decisions for myself about how far I am prepared to . . . compromise my own perspective in order to collaborate’ (education/ health). There was also the need to ‘find this balance’ between disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity – ‘if you’re trying to be multi-disciplinary without the disciplines, then it’s just superficial hogwash’ (biotechnology). In other cases, interdisciplinary researchers experienced difficulties with job selection panels because they were perceived as unfocused:
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Comments from the selection panel said that [I] was an exemplary interviewee . . . but we don’t really know where her heart lies . . . I was trying to show you that I was trans-disciplinary. I was trying to show that my heart lies in lots of places. (IT) As a result, the most applicable metaphor for these transculturation experiences is that of the ‘chameleon’, which was suggested by one of the researchers in this study (material science/social science). In many ways, interdisciplinary researchers select several hues of their new disciplinary environment to blend in with new ways of thinking and being. They are able to transform their identities but also stay connected with their original disciplinary shape as a researcher.
Implications of interdisciplinary researcher identities These post-colonial insights into interdisciplinary research identities have significant implications for our understandings of twenty-first-century research, for the design of professional development programmes and appointment and promotions processes for early career and experienced researchers and for the curriculum of research higher degree programmes. Governments and universities need to develop policies that acknowledge and value the slipperiness of interdisciplinary researcher identities, facilitating opportunities for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas and creating research quality indicators that measure the power of interdisciplinary research collaborations, allowing for shifting research career paths, publication patterns and research practices. These quality indicators would need to facilitate rather than punish researchers who acted like butterflies, mongrels or chameleons. As a result, there are many significant implications for the design of professional development programmes and appointment and promotion processes for early career and experienced interdisciplinary researchers. Professional development programmes need to focus on developing researchers’ intercultural skills and knowledge so that they could develop the flexibility, trust and respect to work effectively in ambiguous, culturally diverse interdisciplinary research spaces. Additional attempts are required to reduce disciplinary chauvinism and inequities in status, power and access to physical and intellectual resources between disciplines (Younglove-Webb et al. 1999). Real opportunities to work across and between disciplinary boundaries, such as secondments, special study leave and other work exchanges, need to be offered and fully supported by adjusted workloads and additional resources. Interdisciplinary grant readership and mentoring programmes are required (Manathunga et al. 2004). Radical changes need to be made to academic appointment and
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promotion processes. Selection criteria need to explicitly refer to interdisciplinary knowledge and skills, joint appointments should be encouraged and selection committees need to be provided with information about the value and practices involved in interdisciplinary research. Similarly, promotion committees need to recognize the shifting nature of interdisciplinary research career trajectories, publication patterns and researcher identities and to reward butterfly, mongrel and chameleon-like behaviour among researchers by being reassured of the immense intellectual innovation possible in interdisciplinary research. Finally, research higher degree (RHD) programmes could be restructured to encourage research students to gain interdisciplinary research experience, while at the same time deepening their knowledge of their home discipline. Rather than being a narrowing, specializing degree, the PhD needs to broaden research students’ knowledge and understandings of research. RHD students also need additional professional development opportunities to enhance their communication and intercultural skills and knowledge (Grigg 2003; Manathunga et al. 2006). They need to be made aware that interdisciplinary research simultaneously contains generative, productive power and also uncomfortable, unhomely moments of doubt and insecurity. Their training would include explicit socialization into interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary identities. They would be encouraged to learn the skills and practices of butterflies, mongrels and chameleons.
Conclusion Therefore, this research has confirmed the usefulness of using post-colonial theories about liminality, unhomeliness and transculturation to explore interdisciplinary researchers’ working habits and extend our understandings of interdisciplinary research. By applying these constructs to interview data, I have identified not only some of the possibilities for new cultural and disciplinary knowledge inherent in interdisciplinary research but also some of the disturbing results of working across and between disciplinary boundaries. I have highlighted the interdisciplinary working habits of these researchers and how their experiences shape shifting, complex researcher identities. I have shown how these researchers enacted butterfly, mongrel and chameleon metaphors chosen by some of them to illustrate how they work and who they are as researchers. These new understandings of interdisciplinary researcher identities have many significant implications for the radical transformation of research policies, professional development programmes and appointment and promotions processes for early career and experienced researchers and research higher degree programmes. Further research needs to be conducted into how these shifts in research policy and practice could be operationalized. As an academic developer who specializes in supervisors’ professional development and is investigating researcher professional development, this study
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has a number of significant implications for my future development work. This research has particularly demonstrated that, in order to engage productively in twenty-first-century research, a complex, nuanced understanding of interdisciplinary researcher practices and identities is a necessary addition to the scholarship of research.
References Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1998) Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London: Routledge. Barnett, R. (2000) Working knowledge, in J. Garrick and C. Rhodes (eds) Research and Knowledge at Work: Perspectives, Case Studies and Innovative Strategies (pp. 15–31). London: Routledge. Bauer, H. (1990) Barriers against interdisciplinarity: implications for studies of science, technology, and society (STS), Science, Technology, and Human Values, 15: 105–19. Becher, T. and Trowler, P. (2001) Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines, 2nd edn. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Bella, D. and Williamson, K. (1976) Conflicts in interdisciplinary research, Journal of Environmental Systems, 6: 105–24. Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Brainard, J. (2002) U.S. agencies look to interdisciplinary science, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 48(40): 20–5. Foster, J. (1999) What price interdisciplinarity? Crossing the curriculum in environmental higher education, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 23(3): 358–66. Fuller, S. (1995) Is there life for sociological theory after the sociology of scientific knowledge? Sociology, 29(1): 159–67. Gibbons, M. (1998) Higher Education Relevance in the 21st Century, Departmental Working Paper, No. 19717. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Grigg, L. (1999) Cross-Disciplinary Research: A Discussion Paper, Commissioned Report No. 61. Canberra: Australian Research Council. Grigg, L. (2003) Emerging Issues for Cross-Disciplinary Research. Canberra: Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. Klein, J. T. (1996) Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities and Interdisciplinarities. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Klein, J. T. (2001) Transdisciplinarity: Joint Problem Solving among Science, Technology, and Society: An Effective Way for Managing Complexity. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag. Klein, J. T. (2003) The Transition to Transdisciplinarity. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Retrieved 3 May 2006 from: http://www.interdisciplines.org/ McCarty, W. (2001) Looking through an unknown, remembered gate: interdisciplinary meditations on humanities computing, Interdisciplinary Science Review, 26(3): 173–82. Macdonald, R. (2000) The education sector, in M. A. Somerville and D. J. Rapport (eds) Transdisciplinarity: Recreating Integrated Knowledge (pp. 241–4). Oxford: EOLSS Publishers. Manathunga, C. (2006) Doing educational development ambivalently: post-colonial
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approaches to educational development? International Journal for Academic Development, 11(1): 19–29. Manathunga, C. (2007a) ‘Unhomely’ academic developer identities: more postcolonial explorations of academic development, International Journal for Academic Development, 12(1): 25–34. Manathunga, C. (2007b) Intercultural postgraduate supervision: ethnographic journeys of identity and power, in D. Palfreymam and D. McBride (eds) Learning and Teaching across Cultures in Higher Education (pp. 93–113). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Manathunga, C. (2009) Research as an intercultural ‘contact zone’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30: 2: 165–77. Manathunga, C., Lant, P. and Mellick, G. (2004) Interdisciplinary Research Education and Staff Development: An Interdisciplinary Study. Brisbane: University of Queensland. Manathunga, C., Lant, P., and Mellick, G. (2006) Imagining an interdisciplinary doctoral pedagogy, Teaching in Higher Education, 11(3): 365–79. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pratt, M. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rowland, S. (2003) Academic development: a practical or theoretical business? In H. Eggins and R. Macdonald (eds) The Scholarship of Academic Development (pp. 13–22). Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and the Open University Press. Younglove-Webb, J., Gray, B., Abdalla, C., and Purvis Thurow, A. (1999) The dynamics of multidisciplinary research teams in academia, Review of Higher Education, 22(4): 425–40.
9 ‘You do it from your core’: priorities, perceptions and practices of research among Indigenous academics in Australian and New Zealand universities Christine Asmar, Ocean Rı¯peka Mercier and Susan Page Introduction In a global higher education system where principles of equity, social inclusion and decolonization are increasingly integral to the discourse, the voices of Indigenous academics now have space in which to resonate. Given the past and continuing experiences of Indigenous peoples in interactions with Western researchers, however, the Indigenous research arena remains a highly political one. It was only after the 2005 passing of the Human Tissues Act, for example, that the British Museum even began to consider the repatriation of Indigenous human remains from their collections. In 2006, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre argued successfully for the return to Tasmania of two ancestral bundles of cremation ash. The Museum Trustees noted that since the ancestral remains had already been extensively studied, photographed and published, it was ‘unlikely that their retention in London for study will yield any further information of significance’ (British Museum 2006). While such cases receive due attention in the media, the ongoing effects of colonial era research on the Indigenous populations of today are less well known. The Torres Strait Islander scholar Martin Nakata (2007b) has written an exhaustive account of the research conducted among Indigenous peoples of the Torres Strait by the 1898 Cambridge Expedition. As a direct result of the (erroneous) association of his island community with the word for blood, Nakata relates how he ‘grew up with, and learned only to accept, the outsiders’ reading of our place in the islands as meaning “bloodthirsty” people’ (Nakata 2007b, p. 60). How, then, do Indigenous scholars view research today? Indigenous research sets itself firmly apart from positivist views which see research as a quest for knowledge which ‘has not been touched by human hands’ (Brew 2001, p. 52), but it defies easy categorization, in part because of its contested post-colonial terrain. In Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking Decolonizing
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Methodologies, research is seen as ‘a significant site of struggle’ between the West and the Other (Smith 1999, p. 2). To the voice of Smith (a leading Ma¯ ori scholar) are added those of First Nations colleagues in Canada, who go further in maintaining that colonialist exclusions and injustices persist within Western tertiary institutions (Battiste et al. 2005, p. 11). In Australia, Lester-Irabinna Rigney has been influential in asserting that to counteract what he sees as a racialized research industry, much more ‘Indigenist’ research is needed (Rigney 1997, pp. 114–18). Despite the intensity with which these views are articulated, and the powerful historical justifications behind them, it would be misleading to see the battle lines as irrevocably stark and the possibilities of compromise, negotiation and positive outcomes negated. Indeed, some contemporary Indigenous researchers explicitly reject confrontational discourse, rejecting terms such as ‘tensions’ and ‘boundaries’ in favour of ‘mediate’ and ‘negotiate’ (Martin 2008). To see the field of Indigenous research solely as a highly politicized battleground, then, would be to over-simplify the way researchers in that field currently see, experience and interpret the world, as we hope our findings will show. In reporting on our surveys of Indigenous academics in Australia and New Zealand, we hope that the sharing of our research findings will inform some of the very debates we have been referring to, as well as embodying how collaborative and culturally appropriate approaches can transcend potential barriers. Although we reference work done by Indigenous scholars in Canada and the United States, as well as Australia and New Zealand, we do not attempt to provide a definitive overview of Indigenous academic research activity across the Pacific region or beyond. Nor do we try to define the essential characteristics of Indigenous research itself, since this has been and is being analysed by other scholars (Smith 1999; Nakata 2007a, 2007b; Martin 2008). Rather, our focus is on the researchers, and how they experience the act of research. We anticipate that our findings will have implications well beyond the southern hemisphere, for despite their small numbers, Indigenous researchers are now firmly located within the global networks to which we all belong. Census data indicate that Indigenous people constitute tiny proportions of the total population in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States (3.7 per cent, 2.4 per cent and 1.8 per cent respectively); with a higher percentage in New Zealand (14.6 per cent). The lack of a critical mass is even more marked in universities, where Indigenous representation in the total population of academics with teaching and research responsibilities is even smaller than in their respective national populations as a whole. On one level, this is a serious equity concern. On another level it means that working with (and mostly within) ‘mainstream’ institutions will continue to be a fact of Indigenous academic life. Recognizing these demographic imperatives, Indigenous scholars have for some years been proposing collaborative new agendas for Indigenous research. Smith (1999, p. 178) acknowledges the utility of ‘bicultural’ or ‘partnership’ research for Ma¯ ori, while one group of Indigenous and
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non-Indigenous social scientists (Moeke-Pickering et al. 2006) sees ‘building allies within the system’ as a pathway to Indigenous research liberation. In the Canadian context, McGregor (2005, p. 67) proposes a ‘co-existence model’, while Battiste (2008) – long a trenchant critic of colonialist paradigms – now envisages a more optimistic future for Indigenous knowledges in the academy and elsewhere; a future she conceives of as an Indigenous ‘renaissance’. In Australia, Nakata’s (2007b, p. 199) ‘cultural interface’ envisages a richly dynamic space of complex interactions between different peoples, although he notes elsewhere that there may also be ‘tensions created between Indigenous and non-Indigenous dualities’ (Nakata 2007a, p. 12). A particularly optimistic vision for the future is proposed by the Ma¯ ori scholar Mason Durie (2005, p. 142), who sets out four principles relating to how Indigenous and Western research could be brought together: namely, with mutual respect, shared benefits, human dignity, and discovery; for the benefit and new learning of both. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999, p. 9) is among many who acknowledge the influence of feminism, and of other critical approaches to research, in opening up new spaces within the academy for more creative ways of doing research with, rather than research on, Indigenous peoples. Major names in the Western research literature (including the editors of this volume) are now foregrounding Indigenous research as a recognized alternative methodology. We see as an important step Denzin and Lincoln’s collaboration with Smith to co-edit their 2008 Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, despite certain shortcomings such as the unexplained absence of Indigenous Australian contributors. Formal acknowledgement that Indigenous research often requires a category of its own has been forthcoming at the level of policies in relation to government funding. In early 2008, for example, Australia and New Zealand adopted a common Standard Research Classification specifically including new Indigenous categories (Australian Research Council 2008). It is refreshing that work such as ours can now be categorized under a heading which is not simply ‘Other’. As a research team describing itself as ‘binational and tricultural’, we appreciate the recognition now afforded work such as ours by the academy, and we find the new collaborative ethos a very appropriate framework for our own work.
How we define and locate our research In this chapter, for brevity’s sake, the term ‘Indigenous Australians’ refers to Australians of either Aboriginal, or Torres Strait Islander descent; and the term ‘Ma¯ ori’ refers to the Indigenous people of New Zealand. We see our own work as contributing to the new inclusivity already outlined above. As a Ma¯ ori, an Aboriginal Australian and a non-Indigenous Australian, we do not see Indigenous research (or, for that matter, Indigenous teaching) as necessarily confined to Indigenous individuals (Langton, cited
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in Nakata 2004, p. 2). What is crucial, however, is that our research should fulfil criteria such as those outlined by Denzin, Lincoln and Smith (2008, p. 2) for critical Indigenous qualitative research. We try to ensure, for example, that our research represents Indigenous persons honestly; is accountable to Indigenous persons; and benefits the self-determination of our participants. We wish to make it clear that, despite being philosophically influenced by the literature on Indigenous methodologies, our methods are empirical and arguably ‘Western’ (although this distinction can be debated; see Mercier 2007). Empirical research, residually associated with colonization, is still regarded with suspicion by Indigenous peoples who continue to experience exploitation at the hands of non-Indigenous researchers. The outcomes of such research may well benefit non-Indigenous careers but are less often returned to the community members who agreed to share their knowledges and experiences. There are consequences to this history of academic carelessness; one established Indigenous researcher in Queensland, working within an over-researched and thus reticent community, reports that it took her nine months to gain access to the senior Aboriginal man who held the knowledges she needed to hear about for her PhD research (Martin 2008). Despite such historical Indigenous mistrust of Western research, however, our own choice of methods has been unproblematic for our particular ‘community’, who are after all seasoned academics in mainstream universities. With backgrounds in physical and social sciences, we value rigour and structure, utilizing empirical research tools in spite of their being implicated in the less salubrious research agendas of the modernist project. The fact that our Australian project received a second round of funding from the main national Indigenous funding body (AIATSIS) in 2008 seems testimony to the cultural appropriateness as well as the rigour of our approach.
Background and context The expanding profile of Indigenous research in the academy is counterbalanced by the miniscule number of Indigenous academics available to do this work. While small Indigenous academic populations are a global phenomenon, the situation in Australia is particularly stark. The Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council (IHEAC) reported in 2008 that the proportion of Indigenous staff relative to all university staff in 2007 was only 0.8 per cent, or ‘less than a third of what it should be if population parity existed’. In other words, given that the Indigenous proportion of the population of Australia as a whole is 2.4 per cent, their representation among university staff should also be no lower than 2.4 per cent. The IHEAC also reported that among those staff, the proportion of Indigenous academics was actually dropping; and that only 15 per cent of Indigenous academic staff hold a doctorate compared with 57 per cent of non-Indigenous academic staff (IHEAC 2008, pp. 6–10). The Australian government has been advised that to achieve
150 Researcher experiences and identities parity of participation, overall Indigenous doctoral completions would need to increase by a startling 600 per cent (Indigenous Higher Education Advisory Council 2008, p. 41). In New Zealand, 2006 census data indicate that the percentage of Ma¯ ori in the overall population is 14.6 per cent, but the proportion of Ma¯ ori academics in universities is only 3.6 per cent of all academics (Tertiary Education Commission, personal communication, 14 Nov. 2008), indicating quite severe under-representation. Ma¯ ori academics appear to have a reasonable rate of doctoral completions, although this information is not systematically collected by the government (at our Ma¯ ori co-author’s institution in 2008, about 30 per cent of the Ma¯ ori academics had completed PhDs). While the number of Ma¯ ori researchers in universities is declining (White and Grice 2008, p. 5), this may be accounted for by the concurrent establishment of Wa¯ nanga, institutions broadly equivalent to the Tribal Colleges of North America, to which numerous Ma¯ ori academics are now gravitating. (At this stage Australia only has one such institution.) The research climate in New Zealand is heavily influenced by the national Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) – an exercise similar to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the United Kingdom – whereby academic staff are rated on their research productivity, and their institutions funded accordingly (see Chapter 2). (In Australia a similar initiative appears imminent.) This has added to the pressures on all academic staff, but particularly those in newer areas of research, including Indigenous. The multiplicity of interwoven factors affecting the Indigenous research environment in our region highlights, among other things, the need for much more research to enhance our understanding of the Indigenous researcher situation. What, for example, might explain the declining Indigenous representation in academia? And what is being done to encourage more Indigenous doctoral completions? While not pretending to have come up with the answers to these questions, we will now proceed to outline how we went about our study, and what our main findings were.
Methods and samples The project originated with a study of Indigenous academics in Australia by Page and Asmar, funded by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). Twenty-three academics, nearly all located in Indigenous units, schools or centres (as opposed to disciplines or departments), were interviewed. Not long afterwards, an opportunity arose to replicate the study in New Zealand, in collaboration with Mercier. The Australian survey instruments were modified for the Ma¯ ori context, for example, including Ma¯ ori language on the Information Sheet, but the questions were almost identical. Twelve academics were interviewed, seven of them based within Ma¯ ori Studies centres.
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Selected attributes of the participants are set out in Table 9.1. Males and females are equally represented in the samples but clear differences emerge in terms of those with completed doctorates. Despite the lack of doctoral degrees among the Australian academics in particular, eight of them held positions at Director (or Acting Director) level. The small pool of qualified Indigenous individuals, entering academia via non-traditional pathways, thus appear well able to be appointed or promoted on the basis of professional or industry experience, rather than formal academic qualifications. The Australian study was a national one involving 23 universities, while the New Zealand study focused on two universities, with results rather more suggestive than generalizable. Our sample sizes were not large, but, then, neither were our populations. We used NVivo Version 2 software to systematically interrogate and report from the data (Bazeley 2006; 2007). Validity was enhanced by triangulation of findings from the two data sets against other sources of data. Rigorous ethical procedures were followed in terms of community consultation and participant anonymity, and all interviews were conducted by one or both of the Indigenous researchers. All our analysis and, indeed, our writing has been closely collaborative, with regular teleconferences and face-to-face meetings in Australia and New Zealand.
Findings What constitutes ‘research’? Our interview questions asked the academics how they experienced their roles and work in general, making no specific reference to research. When the subject of research came up, the discrepancy revealed in Table 9.1 in terms of who had PhDs was reflected in their comments. Unsurprisingly, 20 out of the 23 (87 per cent) Indigenous Australians referred to their research in terms of the higher degrees in which more than half the sample were enrolled, and which were (mostly) seen as vital for their careers. Other aspects of research were mentioned less often in the Australian group. For the Ma¯ ori, more than half of whom already had doctorates, reflections upon research activity were made in terms of its relevance to the PBRF round at Table 9.1 Selected attributes of Indigenous academic participants surveyed in Australia and New Zealand
Number of women Number of men Number with completed PhDs Number enrolled in PhDs
Australia (n = 23)
New Zealand (n = 12)
12 11 2 7
6 6 7 4
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the time. For both groups, research was something they both needed and wanted to do – albeit in differing contexts and with different priorities. We were mindful of Bazeley’s (2009) strictures against the kind of approach to analysis which seeks merely to identify broad themes in the qualitative data, then illustrate them with possibly random quotes. Silverman (2005, p. 211) is likewise critical of ‘anecdotalism’. We therefore used NVivo to carry out a systematic series of matrix intersections which allowed us to identify with certainty the issues which most often intersected with (i.e. were mostly spoken about in relation to) research. Following Bazeley (2009), the analysis was completed well before the selection of quotes. Research rarely occurs in a vacuum, so examining the intersections enabled us to arrive at a deeper understanding of how doing (or not doing) research was actually being experienced on a daily basis, rather than how research was conceived of in the abstract.
Issues intersecting with research The issues recurring most often across both groups in relation to research activities, (including work on higher degrees) were as follows, in order of importance:
• • • •
Teaching Workload Career Satisfaction
The issues of teaching and of workload were most prominent. Career aspects of research were spoken of by the Indigenous Australian participants more than by the Ma¯ ori, for whom recognition of one’s research was more of an issue. While the first three issues listed are potentially sources of pressure, the prominence of satisfaction (also associated with motivation) is a reminder that research can also bring real fulfilment. As will also be apparent, underlying all these issues is an enduring sense of commitment to Indigenous communities, including the students who embody those communities. For the remainder of this section we will deal successively with the issues listed above. The categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, an individual might mention workload when speaking of their research in general and again when speaking of their higher degree. The focus across the two cohorts is on the issues appearing most salient; on who said what (for example, issues referred to mainly by Directors); and, importantly, on how issues were spoken of (for example, as motivating or demotivating). Demographic variables such as gender and age did not appear to greatly influence responses, although level of appointment and qualifications were of interest.
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Teaching: Australia While Australian academics often report that teaching takes time from research, and most prefer research over teaching (Coates et al. 2008, p. 4), this was not the picture revealed by our Indigenous participants. While it was acknowledged that teaching was time-consuming, this did not diminish a clear sense of mission in relation to teaching Indigenous students. Indigenous pedagogy, it should be noted, usually involves a strong element of student support. The need to be constantly available to such students – many of whom arrive in university less prepared than their non-Indigenous counterparts – was acknowledged by some as exhausting, but is seen as a necessary part of the job. Supporting Indigenous students requires more than tea and sympathy. It can extend across campuses and across cultures, for example, in the way delicate mediations may be required to handle potential conflicts between Indigenous students, on the one hand, and non-Indigenous teaching and administrative staff, on the other. Relations with non-Indigenous teaching colleagues were reported as being rewarding and productive in some instances, but a source of extra work and even angst in others, causing precious time and energy to be spent in nonproductive ways. Teaching non-Indigenous students was another dimension, bringing its own satisfactions (and challenges) though not the same passionate level of commitment as in relation to Indigenous students. Some felt that Indigenous teaching was qualitatively superior to other academic teaching, a perception reinforcing their continued allegiance to it despite its detracting from their research. Finally, our data suggest that the historically strong tradition of teaching in Indigenous Australian units may now be shifting towards a more explicitly research-oriented culture. Directors, particularly, note the need to systematically mentor staff towards completing higher degrees, which can mean reducing teaching loads and commitments. This trend may well accelerate when Australia joins New Zealand in setting up a PBRF-type system for assessing research productivity. We have written in more detail elsewhere about Indigenous Australian teaching; including support roles in Page and Asmar (2008) and pedagogical interactions across cultures in Asmar and Page (accepted for publication). Teaching: New Zealand A similarly strong and proud tradition of teaching exists among the Ma¯ ori academics. A number spoke of their students as a key reason they are in academia, and all had had – or were experiencing – the dual roles of teaching while working on their higher degrees. The need for academics to take on student support roles did not seem as pressing for Ma¯ ori as in Australia, perhaps because of the larger proportion of Ma¯ ori non-academic staff in universities who are contracted to provide support to students. With a high PBRF consciousness evident in responses, Ma¯ ori academics reflected not just on their personal need to find a balance between research and teaching, but on what many saw as a PBRF-driven imbalance between the two activities. A
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number commented on the nexus – or, as one put it, ‘bundling’ – of research with teaching as being common in Ma¯ ori research, for example, in research mentoring for graduate students. Thus, in spite of institutional and indeed national pressures to focus on research, no Ma¯ ori we spoke to were willing to give their teaching a lower priority, and instead participants were vocalizing strategies for addressing teaching and research goals together. Workload: Australia Work overload is a well-documented cause of stress among academics (Gillespie et al. 2001, p. 60). In speaking of research (including higher degrees), workload issues were mentioned by more Indigenous Australian academics than any other issues. They also had more to say about the subject of workload than our Ma¯ ori participants did. However, ‘workload’ can and did mean many things. It was certainly not the actual term used by most interviewees. Broadly speaking, most of the comments we coded here related to academics’ explanations as to why they were not doing the research they felt they should be doing, particularly in terms of completing their higher degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching (already seen to be a pressing priority for Indigenous academics), there is the related challenge of arranging research supervision for Indigenous and non-Indigenous graduate students alike, in centres where doctorates are rare. Staff themselves need Indigenous research supervisors, and indeed one participant had to look as far as New Zealand, for supervision by Ma¯ ori colleagues. Cultural and community activities constitute an additional sphere of activity – often time-consuming – to which they feel a strong personal commitment (but about which they did not complain). Administrative loads were mentioned by some, but most junior staff saw their centres or units as supportive of their research, with some mentioning that they were explicitly encouraged to take a day for research (especially for their higher degrees) each week; to use consultancy money for research; or to apply for conference travel funding. For all the reasons just outlined, however, those opportunities were not always taken up (although appreciated), and in any case not all centres were seen as able to provide such support. As mentioned earlier, five out of eight Directors in our sample were enrolled in higher degrees. Our data indicated that the workload of a head of centre makes it very hard to plan for the completion of their own degree, while the absence of such a degree affects their capacity to act as research supervisors. In this the academics somewhat resemble those arriving in senior academic jobs from professional careers in, say, law or accountancy. In relation to workload issues, references to non-Indigenous interactions varied, with some participants’ administrative load connected to reviewing non-Indigenous research proposals (by staff or students) in terms of whether proposed interactions with Indigenous communities are appropriate. This kind of work ranged from formal committee work (for example, on Ethics
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committees) to ‘people knocking on our door all the time wanting to do postgraduate research, and the existing staff are just saturated’ (AUS #23). Workload: New Zealand Heavy workloads were often mentioned by Ma¯ ori academics (sometimes at quite senior levels) as an inevitable consequence of being involved in teaching, research, administration, community engagement and interactions with non-Ma¯ ori staff. At community level, iwi (tribes) value their people becoming credentialled, but then expect ‘their’ academics to service iwi demands for research (often related to complex land claims). Involvement in such research activity, however, was accepted despite the demands made on time and energy: ‘I’m just involved now with a research project back in my tribe . . . and it takes me seven hours to drive there any time I want to go . . . there’s a cost to all of that and it’s usually my health!’ (NZ#03). Some participants felt that a greater PBRF-driven research focus among their colleagues had increased their own workload as they continued to fulfil cultural and community obligations. While certain participants felt they could choose how to prioritize the work they take on board, there was a pervasive sense of obligation to forces external to academe (see below). Career: Australia Our Australian participants were in no doubt about their personal capacity for research, nor about the importance of research profiles – including doctorates – for academic careers and promotion, not to mention earning respect both on and off campus. One, noting her lack of progress on a PhD, said: ‘The stuff I hadn’t done – that’s not from lack of ability, that’s about being overworked’ (AUS #05). A higher percentage in Australia linked career and research issues than in our Ma¯ ori sample. This we see as linked – once again – to the issue of whether doctoral degrees are still being undertaken. Reported barriers to developing research in Australia included: being promoted or appointed to demanding leadership roles; the lack of a critical mass of researchers and/ or well-developed research culture; perceptions of having no time to do research (vis-à-vis the sometimes prioritized activity of teaching); and issues to do with the perceived ‘legitimacy’ of one’s research in the mainstream. Overall there seems to be a kind of chicken-and-egg situation, whereby the career imperative to do research comes up against (perceived) barriers such as the lack of research cultures and the felt need to prioritize teaching – resulting in fewer people achieving research profiles which in turn affects the research culture, and so on: ‘Everything we do is governed around us trying to complete our qualifications and then we can grow our research capacity’ (AUS #11). Career: New Zealand For Ma¯ ori participants, issues directly related to ‘career’ in relation to their research were less prominent than issues of gaining recognition for their
156 Researcher experiences and identities research, once again due to the pervasive effect of the national PBRF exercise. Overall, Ma¯ ori participants perceived a lack of institutional recognition for their work and research (although this experience varied slightly by university). As many see it, this is because Ma¯ ori research often lies at the boundary of institutional conceptions of research, or is not an easy fit within PBRF categories. Such views are echoed in government reports which acknowledge, for example, the potential mismatch between Ma¯ ori and PBRF values (White and Grice 2008, p. 4). Recognition potentially impacts upon the careers of participants in interesting ways, for example, where individuals had failed to gain promotion within their institutions but were awarded the highest research ranking nationally, for their track record in specialist areas. This raised questions as to what a high-ranked research output would look like in Ma ¯ ori research – an issue currently seen by the government as requiring ‘more conceptual thought’ (White and Grice 2008, p. xvi). To some of our participants, institutional prioritizing of research had created an imbalance resulting in the downgrading of teaching, for example in promotions. Finally, as noted earlier with the Indigenous Australians, it was felt that working with non-Ma¯ ori students and staff is an under-recognized, timeconsuming and thus potentially career-affecting aspect of work Ma¯ ori are informally expected to do. Satisfaction and motivation: Australia and New Zealand The discussion above of our participants’ experiences and perceptions of teaching, workload and career issues being played out in relation to their research reveals that not everything is smooth sailing. Yet we should not lose sight of the fact that participants were also lit from within by the fires of their intrinsic motivation and their personal commitment to the ongoing development of their peoples. As one Indigenous researcher put it: ‘I’m trying to write the thesis as if I’m writing to the community’ (AUS#19). This sense of mission is fulfilled in a number of contexts, sometimes coming up against impediments, but our data show that for both cohorts the positives outweighed many of the negatives. For Indigenous Australians still working towards their doctoral degrees, teaching Indigenous students through to success was where they felt it appropriate to concentrate their efforts, and was intrinsically satisfying as well. For Ma¯ ori participants, teaching was a motivator but it was also through their research skills that they felt able – and were expected – to contribute to their iwi and to national policies. For both groups, strong research cultures and relationships – involving heads, supportive peers, mentors and research supervisors are all seen as crucial and are deeply appreciated. Conversely, the lack of such support, including at institutional or government level – where Indigenous knowledges and research, it is felt, remain misunderstood – is demotivating. Funding or the lack of it, interestingl
